There have been several announcements in the last month, which, when taken together, add up to a significant improvement in possible networked systems performance.

Starting from the inside of the server, and working outwards :

Xeon 5600
Intel announced the Xeon processor 5600 (4 and 6 core) and the i7-980 6 core processor. These support great flexibility in trading off price, frequency, power and cache size. Examples :