In the harsh times of the credit crunch the bulk of end users will go for performance/cost over ultimate performance. I see this happening more and more....this is where AMD are aiming this new CPU.They did the same with the 4XXX GPU cards and its working just fine for them as we all know.

I have i7 965XE, i will hopefully soon have Phenem2 940, going on forecast/present pricing would i be able to afford the i7 965?...sorry lads no I would not, but I can afford the 940 and if it clocks like the reports are saying then i would probably have a lot of fun playing with it.

Just to remind you guys the Extreme performance market is tiny, some of the top end boards have total sales less than 200 pieces world wide... If you keep this in mind and look at the price of i7 boards you are going to see in the bigger picture... i7 is to expensive for the average end user to buy. Even those looking to get the lower end models and clock them up still have to pay out $$$ on the boards and probably upgrade to DDR3.

I have a feeling Intel's pricing will change massively over the next few weeks now, i can't see $1500 processors staying at that price and boards will come down massively also.

Competition is good don't you think ?

BTW no insider info here, just my personal opinion