[citation][nom]one-shot[/nom]Power 7 has up to 8 cores and 4 threads/core up to 32 total threads.[/citation]
That doesn't tell the whole story; that's like saying that the PS3's Cell Broadband Engine has 1 core, and the Xbox 360's Xenon has 3, hence the latter is superior.
Like that, Itanium and POWER7 can't really be compared... Even less so, since they're entirely different architectures. (Itanium being IA-64, vs. IBM-POWER for the CBE, Xenon, and POWER7)
Itanium tends to have fewer cores, but a lot more complexity per core, allowing each core to process WAY more per clock cycle than any other architecture; hence, it's considered a unique design; while the POWER architecture is entirely 'RISC,' (Reduced Instruction Set) Itanium goes well beyond the x86-standard 'CISC' (Complex Instruction Set) and is in fact perhaps the world's only 'EPIC' (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture.
Rather than making the CPU figure out how to order the instructions, EPIC/Itanium includes structuring at the compiler level to control branching, allowing for little confusion or delay for the CPU handling complex, branching instructions. All this works out to EACH thread being capable of handling 6 instructions per clock cycle.
That means that while the upcoming POWER7 may have more threads at 32 to 8, Tukwila handles more instructions per clock cycle, at 48 to 32... Couple that with the fact that POWER7 has to cut its instruction complexity to achieve so many threads, and Tukwila almost certainly will provide far more capability at handling complicated instruction trees.
So it's all a matter of design; POWER7 will likely win in the FLoPS ring, due to outright having more cores, (and a whopping 4 floating-point units per core) while Tukwila will certainly be better at the Instructions/second race.