No, but if they're going to imminently switch to a new data center vendor they wouldn't bother rolling out the new hardware at their old data center, would they?
But they upgraded to the 8 core machines recently even in Fremont!
The old L5520 processors they are using have 4 cores with hyperthreading, so it appears as 8 to the OS - so they don't have to have changed the host machines to present 8 cores to the VMs.
He's referring to the recent move to the Sandy Bridge E5-2670 processor. All linode customers have this, but it will require a reboot to activate it.