Intel Finally Including an Integrated Memory Controller

It's taken what, 4 years? Intel has decided that removing the frontside bus roadblock for communication between memory and the CPU might be a good idea.

Even though Intel has been handing AMD its hat since the introduction of their Core 2 Duo processors, they've been dependent on a separate chip on the motherboard to coordinate i/o between the CPU & RAM.

AMD figured this out in 2003 by placing the memory controller on the CPU die. IBM and Sun have done the same. With their 13 or 14 fabrication plants, it seems that Intel has been only incrementally releasing the good stuff when they could be further pummeling AMD. Intel's manufacturing methods are on a process half the size of AMD's, so addtional features and power savings should be readily available to the consumer. How is all that extra die space being used? Yet another core? How about placing some real goodies on there, like embedding VMWare, increasing cache size, and adding some sort of monitoring that can interface with applications for instruction optimization over time? Intel has incredible engineers, let's see some of their innovations!