http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] 0&Itemid=1

Nehalem for $284 ONLY??????? i thought it was goin to cost a fortune and was only for sever untill Q2 of 2009 or sumthing.......

if this is true than amd is going to fall behind again after whatever gains it made with phenom in clock for clock department. dam, i lik amd. i have been using amd from ever since windows98 and i was hoping 2 get 45nm phenom but now it looks lik intel is getting realy attractive specially with the low cpu voltage and all.

Question is - does that say something about its performance?

If it did, it wouldn't be anything good.

Its not as if Intel would have a problem shuttling Penryn based CPUs down to form the low end.

i read in tomshardware that nehalem is only 5 to 10% faster than current penryn. and that was a test system only.but even so cpu will have low voltage requirement and that means it will run cool, this matters to ppl like me who live in hot country.
but i dont think we can overclock it so much as intel plans so lock its memory controller in the cpu in order to prevent OC. now that would be realy sad coz ppl would then rather buy penryn coz it OCs.

Yes, The Article states about 10-15% faster which matches some early reviews I've read.

The Price would also come close to Intel's current pricing model.
I would be surprised if it was priced much higher.

Remember, AMD will be shipping 45nm Quads by the end of the year.
These will be cheaper to make and possilby clock higher.
For this reason, Intel needs to keep shipping faster processors and moving them down the line so the slow ones bump off the price list.

They make profit by keeping still faster processors at the higher end of the price list.

Intel has said more than oncce that the Nehalm will be around in Q4 and not just the enthusiast models. The question will be supply.

One thing that will help shortages is that the chip will require a new Mobo.
This will limit demand slightly as upgrades will be a little more difficult.

The other thing that will help, is these chips are built on the same 45nm process so the ramp will be fairly easy. Intel had an easier time ramping into the Core2Duoe 65nm than to the 45nm, even though the 65nm was a new design.

It's 25-50% faster clock per clock than penryn and it OC's very well on every preview I've seen. Still talking about engineering samples though. It will only use DDR3 which is the major down side unless those prices fall.

Honestly, I think we are in for a bit of disappointment. There's *absolutely no fre@king way* Intel would price an ultra-kick-ass *NEW* arch this way. Just look at QX9770. Just look at the price of Yorkfields when they arrived. Of course we also have the very expensive 3.2 Nehalem version, but even so...

Probably it is not doing THAT well in what we, buyers of enthusiast tech, do: Games.

Just speculation, anyway. I hope it's nice, but I don't have that many hopes...

(PS: This 25/50% is just in heavily multi-threaded applications, if I remember correctly. I have seen slides from Intel claiming 1.2x performance clock-per-clock vs Penryn in a single-threaded environment, which is kinda pointless if you own a fast/overclocked Penryn, if you ask me)

The article has a major flaw though. If that is a LGA1366 then it is triple channel DDR3 not dual. The dual channel DDR3 will be on the other socket with less contacts. Thats the whole reason why there are 2 sockets for desktop users.

As for the price determining performance, I doubt that. I think its because Intel has gotten the 45nm process to yeild very well. The more ya have the less it can cost in the begining and the more you will sell sooner and faster.

If I remember the Yorkfields they came out priced quite decently. In the $300s for the lowest quad core. Thats not too bad considering the advantages (new process, HK/MG/45nm, and SSE 4.1) it had over Kentsfield.

The 20-50% was in an array of apps. 20% in single threaded is a nice bump but the advantage of 50% in multithreaded apps (and games when the software developers get off their ass) is great.

I agree with you regarding the 45nm process, however, we are not talking about AMD/ATI: we are talking about Intel - who can afford to price their top-end CPUs at 1000$+. Do you think that, if it delivered what it promised, people wouldn't happily spend 600$+ for the lower clocked model? There are even guys buying QX9770 for an unlocked multiplier, I mean, WTF.

Do you not remember the pricing of Conroe when that was released? Very aggressive price strategy that forced AMD to lower their prices. These suspected prices of Nehalem chips do not suprise me in the slightest, neither do the 10-15% performance gains. However i believe that currently the few programs that AMD is faster in (some weird server calculation things) due to their IMC and therefore increased bandwidth, will, upon the release of Nehalem, be Intel dominated due to the shift from FSB to an IMC.

Then again, this is all just speculation. Noone can actually know until we get some decent samples to test!

And there were people who payed a butt load for Quad FX. There will always be people who buy the most expensive everything. Heck why buy a Ferrari that cost half a million when you can get a Ford GT that will smoke it for only $150k? Why people buy the uber expensive I do not know.

I think what Intel is doing is quite smart. Setting prices at a good point to get more sales faster. This may be because they want to try to phase out the FSB as fast as possible. Or they could just have been working on Nehalem so long that the yeilds are so good that they will still make a butt load at this price point.

Exactly, somethings value is what people are willing to pay for it. There are people who would be willing to pay a great deal of money for a very quick new cpu....if it really is this cheap then it really wont be much quicker. Its not due to intel being nice and thinking of our wallets in a time of hardship.

Us enthusiasts have had it very good the past few years....Core 2 represented a massive jump...as did nVidia 8800 series. Its unrealistic to expect such a jump each new generation. People have been dissappointed with nVidias new offerings because the jump wasn't as big as the previous generation jump. I think people might be a little underwhelmed with intel's new chip simply because we have come to expect a jump like netburst to core2 and i dont think that will happen.

It was $300 for the lowest quad-core, which had a 5-7% advantage (SSE4.1 is barely used even nowadays) over a Q6600. *NOW* I would get a Yorkfield over a Kentsfield anyday, but not at th