I bet you'll be right too. AMD did just that with their K8s and the integrated memory controller with its lower latencies and higher bandwidth to RAM made large caches less useful. The caches sizes used by Intel are mostly there to mediate the FSB's delay in data I/O. Also with the monolithic core chips, large caches make for large individual dies that drive prices up and yields down.
The current 65 nm 4MB L2 Core 2 Duo Conroe dies are 144 mm^2 and the 65 nm 2MB Core 2 Duo Allendale dies are 111 mm^2. That would put a 6MB L2 cache Core 2 Duo on 65 nm at 177 mm^2, and a shrink of that to 45 nm would make an 88.5 mm^2 die, which is what Wolfdale is supposed to be. A monolithic 45 nm quad-core with the purported 12MB L2 could thus be no smaller than 177 mm^2, and probably a bit bigger as the IMC and such would add extra transistors and surface area. If we call the area 190 mm^2. That's not a huge chip, but it's not small, either. If Intel puts roughly as much cache on the die as AMD will for the K8L, that will be about 6MB total, which would halve the die area required for cache and drive the die size down to about 140 mm^2. That's the size of the current Core 2 Duo and seems to be a size that is conducive to good yields and low costs.
EDIT: If you are looking for what might be exciting or novel from Intel this year....
- Watch 45 nm, the rumor mill is amiss with high-k, if this is true AMD will not hold the performance crown in 2007 and we will need to look to 2008 for what migh be competitive against Nehalem. But with an IMC and the BW that goes with that, well, AMD has their work cut out for them.... it will be interesting.
AMD has a reputation for being very quiet with things until they actually happen. The ATi acquisition, 65 nm processors, QuadFX...we weren't told that they really did exist until they happened for the most part. From the floor plan on the K8L, it looks to be a very competitive design and we'll see how well it does later this year.
- I would not be surprised if Intel cuts in a dual FSB on the high end Bearlake chipset and produces a dual socket workstation/DT MB in the same vain as AMD's 4x4 -- just to keep up with the core race as AMD will tout 8 cores on the board when barcelona hits. This is purely speculation... however, they already know how to do it as broadwater already employees a 64 meg Snoop filter chipset with dual FSBs, I could see a DT variety with say a 32 Meg or 16 Meg snoop filter and dual FSBs.
I'd not be surprised if Intel does this IFF AMD sells a lot of QuadFX units. If the QuadFX doesn't do all that well, Intel won't bother as the people who'd want 8 cores on one board could just buy Xeon DPs as they'd functionally be the same, except that a desktop variant would likely be significantly less expensive and use normal DDR2 instead of FB-DIMMs.
I think that the dual-socket units with normal DDR2 memory would do well if sold as top-level workstations instead of gaming machines. They would be more expensive than normal UP desktops but not nearly as big of a jump to a current server-based DP system with buffered ECC RAM and such that's probably not needed on what's basically just a very powerful desktop. If the concept is still around in a few years, and I hope it is, I'd buy one of these type of platforms as the cost to entry to a lot of cores is much reduced over buying server parts.