Like AMD, originally Intel was a company that manufactured memory chips. A common misconception is that both of these behemoths do nothing beyond producing processors. That being said, Intel does know memory rather well. It's no surprise that they are most likely going to be including memory controllers integrated into the processor, akin to the Athlon64 and its predecessors do. Though the technique is not the same, in order to continue pushing the envelope and giving both servers and workstations the next step up, something has to be done about the bottleneck of memory speed. Integrating the controller onto the cpu is a way to tackle this.
Although Intel did not confirm this as of a month ago, they have alluded to it several times this year at press conferences and it does seem to be the way to go. What starts with the Xeon will likely end up on the desktop. For those Intel fans out there - This can only mean good things. Fast ram, faster controllers. According to the article, likely by 2007 we will see all Intel solutions being multi-core and having integrated controllers.