This will likely suck, because the interconnect Intel is using is just too damn slow. Putting four cores in the same package will just make the situation worse, because a lot of applications are significantly limited by memory performance.
The Woodcrest processors have been put through their paces pretty well on the supercomputing lists, and their Achille's heal is the memory subsystem. Current generation AMD Opterons still clearly outscale Woodcrest in real-world memory bandwidth with only two cores. Unless Intel pulls a rabbit out of their hat with their memory architecture issues when the quad core is released, AMDs quad core is going to embarrass them because of the memory bottleneck. And AMD is already starting to work on upgrading their already markedly superior memory architecture.
