Doesn't say when they expect to ship one of these guys, although you could be right that they are clearing out IPF to ready this product. Looks like high-end workstations will be the first product. (It's also going into PlayStation, among other platforms, which should give us an indication of the targetted production costs.)
This sounds very similar to Sun's new approach, doesn't it? The IBM approach seems to have a single integer core and multiple floating point cores, I'm not sure about the fine details of Sun's plans.
What should be obvious to even the casual observer is that the industry is not going to lay down and be rolled over by IPF. Yes, future Itaniums will be powerful; so will other products.
BTW - IBM's approach seems to be first to blunt Itanium by introducing early support of Opteron, then to blow out everyone with this new architecture. It explains a lot about IBM's product relationship with AMD: They want to support AMD just enough to undermine Intel, but not so much so that they create a monster.
They learned from the early PC days when they supported struggling Intel against the microprocessor king Motorola. They succeeded in blunting Moto and unwittingly created the Intel we all came to know.
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