YB, Re: If you think 4-way Madison will be faster than 4-way Opteron (which is not a fact, maybe it will not), just take 8-way Opteron. You don't have to compare 4-to-4, why should you? Compare rack-to-rack.
An interesting premise, but not every company buys server systems with rack density in mind. Racks are more of a front-end convenience, but Itanium is being aimed at the back-end. Even if there are 8-way Opteron systems this year (which I highly doubt, given that no one has announced any plans for this), it will likely be compared against other 8-way Itanium 2 systems. The reason is that besides additional performance, larger CPU scaled systems carry additional features. These include more I/O, more RASUM, and more memory capacity. Opteron can certainly support these things, but the platform still needs to be designed to accommodate them. That means more I/O backplanes, more memory add-in boards, more server management hooks, etc. This is much more than any whitebox provider can offer. Unless AMD gets a major tier-1 or tier-2 design win with an investment to create the infrastructure for a large scaled-up Opteron platform, I wouldn't expect to see any.
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