Intel's Lynnfield chips to arrive in early September

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Julio Franco

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After an intentional delay to cope with overstock problems, a number of sources in Taiwan have reportedly confirmed today that Intel's next generation Lynnfield chips and P55 motherboards will arrive in stores on September 1st. The so-called Core i5 parts come as mainstream variants to the Nehalem micro architecture, though unfortunately the use of a new socket (LGA-1156) sort of defeats the whole ‘more affordable’ idea for users seeking to simply upgrade to a faster processor.


However, there are some fundamental architectural differences between Core i7 and the new Lynnfield chips that Intel believes warrant this socket change. Namely that the cheaper Core i5 will feature an integrated dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, rather than triple-channel DDR3 on the higher end platform, and a DMI controller instead of QPI for communication with the Intel P55 (Ibexpeak) chipset.

Pictures and benchmarks of a prototype Lynnfield processor first appeared online earlier this week, giving us a peek at the level of performance these chips will offer, and now Anandtech has secured a Lynnfield sample as well and posted a more in-depth review. Meanwhile, there has been no shortage of P55-based motherboard previews around the web.

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Yet another socket type from Intel. I suppose motherboard makers aren't complaining.
 
I hope amd gives something good with the 45nm chips, or they may be stuck selling in the low end focus group, and yet they still have to compete with intel there.
 
Why they wen't DMI instead of using QPI is beyond me. sure it might prevent canibalizing their high end, and it might be cheaper to impliment, but int he long run mantaining 2 seperate processes to do similar things seems a bit strange from a cost and marketing perspective. in the end it will only hurt them, as their QPI is much better and is what they are betting on for their future road maps. It is just like making most of the Aton chips only 32 bit, that killed mainstream 64 bit adoption in the netbook area... oh well
 
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