"The P55 chipset will be priced at US$40.”

Is this a typo?

Hehe, yeah, the chipset will cost $40, and for every additional PCI, SATA, and Lan slot...

I wonder how much will core i5 differentiate from i7 on the benchmarks... would it worth waiting ?

the chipset cost is just that, the chipset. Not actual retail boards.

I am also curious as to whether or not these will have any improvements over the i7.

The i7 has proven to be the most clock efficient, and overclocks like a champ.
The cheapest i7 is $280 right now, and I personally want it. Will we have any reason other than price alone to get an i5?
I'm personally hoping it can exploit the benefits of ddr3 better and have even better clock efficiency.

How many processor cores will the i5 have? Is it still a quad core but smaller? Tri-core? Dual? what?

Can someone tell me what the Core i5 is? I thought i7 was the "more mainstream" product (Xeon being the top-end). What makes i5 different from i7? How is $500+ "more mainstream"?

Sorry, meant $200+.

Bloomfield (i7) is high end desktop, Lynnfield is mainstream desktop, and Xeon components are meant as server/workstation CPUs.

@Anamaniac - I thought I read that the P55 chipset runs on DDR2... Doesn't P55 only offer 1 PCIe x16 slot too?

(I might be wrong)

I'm pretty sure i5 is going to be Quad, I could be wrong though.

The P45 and P35 chipset runs DDR2, hasten, the P55 runs DDR3. But where as the i7 boards run triple channel memory, i5 runs dual channel.

http://www.dailytech.com/Intel+Tar [...] e14228.htm

Also seems to not have full PCIe 2.0 slots, or USB 3.0 support. Aww.

i5 is a toned down i7. Dual channel memory instead of triple channel.

Not sure what other things they took out offhand.

Those prices are too expensive tho.

I would loosely liken the Core i5's/Core i7's to the Pentium Dual Cores/Core 2 Duo's....but in quad-core format.

Obviously completely different chipsets and memory are involved but I'm talking about mindset.

Is that fair?

I have a feeling that this idea of releasing two separate sockets for Nehalem is going to be one of Intel's biggest bad ideas since NetBurst.

I think it's certainly an interesting idea. In a way, it allows them to give high performance features to the enthusiast crowd, without having to be as price efficient to cater to everyone. They can use P55 as the gimped, cheaper option meant for budgets, not performance.

I can see it going either way, but the pricing of the i5's has me worried. If they perform aswell as the i7's what's the point? And the 2 most expensive i5's cost as much as the 2 least expensive i7's. What the hell is that about?

i5 initial TDP will be 95w. Come 1st Q of 2010, new i5s will be in the 65w TDP range.

i5 looks to be heading towards energy efficiency. Virtualization is probably at the forefront with these as well.

Can see the day where consumer PCs have a cloud type OS (hypothetical MS OS Virtual Cloud 2)running in the background with a VPC that takes daily snapshots for easy backup and restore (remote restore?). PC vendor customer service utopia.

Why are people asking what memory P55 chipset will support? It won't support DDR2 or DDR3, the processor will support DDR3 though. Chipsets don't have memory controllers anymore for the Nehalem. It's dual channel though, instead of having three channels, which will lower transfer rates, but should also lower latency a little, since dual channel setups have lower latency on the i7.

Probably it will use a little less power, for both the processor and the chipset, so it could be a very appealing platform.

Meh, I don't care whether it's dual channel, I really care more about the actual features and how much speed it truly gives overall. The fact it'll be priced with mobos about ~100 dollars cheaper, and a starting CPU about 80 dollars lower, this might actually be a good Phenom II buster ( provided the performance is all solid )
PCI-E 3.0, honestly, I have never heard of. Sounds like a waste to me, unless you just want to run quad SLI with GTX 395's on x4.... with little stutter. Whatever, they should have full x16 anyways.

Not interested, I will stick with my C2Duos 'till next generation. I have top GPUS and that's all I care about. 562 US$ for a freakin CPU? What's this, the 90's?

It's so obvious.....5 is a lower number than 7.....if you're going to wait for something wait for an 8 core cpu from intel and not a core i5. Personally, I think you should wait for the new 128bit CPU's that will be arriving shortly.

Not sure there would be any benefit in that (at least for the next 5+ years)? 64 bit can support terrabytes of RAM as it is. Most people are still using 32 bit OSs. 99% of software is 32 bit. The world hasn't caught on to 64 bit yet, let alone thinking about 128 bit.

i was hearing these chips might actually be quicker because of integrated PCIe lanes in the cpu, but in saying that, Intel wont allow the 3+ PCIe 16x video card slots on i5 motherboards so as to push people to high end i7 setup's etc for more "hardcore" rigs with tri channel ram etc - see what happens tho

Ummm,no. The chipset is one tiny component of a motherboard. Expect the motherboards to start at $250.

Correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't they be trying to move forward -----> instead of backwards

wow....it cut off my entire post except for the first line. classic.

What I wanted to ask is...shouldn't Intel be creating an i9 to replace their "high-end" desktop chip and let the i7 become their "mainstream" chip? It seems wrong to move in the opposite direction just to compete with AMD. If they wanted real competition then create a new upper level and change the price points of the i7 to directly attack AMD prices.

For a better price, the new Phenom II chips will obliterate the i5 offerings. Right now the 955 can hold its own against Intel's best so I have a hard time understanding why anyone would spend money on a scaled back, weaker, more expensive i5 model than a a 955 BE.

Will it support intel's new hyperthreading like the i7 does? If so, I might be very interested in the i5 for a cheap(er) video encoding box.

These will be like the new core 2 duo's...upgraded basically which is great.

from 2.66 to 2.93 GHz, 270Mhz
from $196 to $562, $366.

I wonder how easy would it be to overclock these cpu's...
I mean, if you want a budget cpu, why in the world would you pay $366 extra for 270Mhz ?

I'll never understand the marketing people...

i5 will have Dual-Channel DDR3 support with its memory controller. It will lack Hyper-Treading (for the 2.6 and 2.8, not sure about the 2.93). Its a Quad-Core CPU, basically the same as the i7 and its Turbo mode won't go as high as the i7. I heard that i5 might have less L3 cache than the i7 also.

P55 will have a maximum of Two PCI-E 16X 2.0 slots (one at 16X, two at 8X each).

With the integrated graphics controller i5 might justify the pricing, as long as it gives some decent performance, preferably higher than today's GMA graphic controllers.

Still, as we know, PhII is about 20% slower than i7 at the extreme and as i5 is a little stripped down, it might well fall below PhII based systems.