Quoting Thrax

Rather than developing larger, faster and hotter cores, Larrabee will boast 16 to 48 x86-compatible execution engines on a single board. Intel hopes that this will be competitive when pitted against next-generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs theorized to be massively-parallel operations with 500 or 600 micro-cores.

I'm not sure if they are going to be able to pull it off with this and make it compete. I would think that the x86 instruction set and memory format would make for too much overhead in both die real estate and execution speed. AMD/nVidia only care about what they need for graphics performance and streamline their cores accordingly (hence my suspicion about the numeric discrepancy in core numbers).

However, it might make a decent Folding proc....but comparing it to the Itanium might be referring to the measure of sucess....

Just thinkin' aloud.