Intel Core i5 Performance

[Blauhung]

Ci5 will replace the P45-P43 S775 boards. I doubt you will see many Ci7 boards below 200€, and for the mainstream especial for the OEMs thats to much money to spend only on a motherboard.

Ci5 boards will be in the 100-200€ range and everything above will be for Ci7. (Bling bling editions are an exception )

What he said, i5 boards (was that P55?) only require a single "bridge" chip (Ibex Peak) that pretty much only has functions of a south bridge. There is no longer any north bridge. This reduces the total cost of silicon per board. Add the fact that it's only using 2 channel memmory and then you can reduce the ammount of DIMM slots and traces from/to the socket. Also with far less components on board, the power delivery requirements are dropped way down and you need far fewer expenditures in the way of power delivery circuitry.

Finally, with all these reductions, mobo makers can do this all on 6 layer PCB's rather then 8 cutting costs by a final huge ammount.

So even though the cost per die to manufacture Lynnsfield/Clarksfield is pretty much the same as Bloomfield/Gainstown. The cost of the core i5 platform as a whole is greatly reduced from the end user standpoint.


edit: Oh yeah, and one more thing. I will be willing to bet that at the platform level, we will see on the order of a 10% power reduction between i7 and i5 at equal clock speed's and performance.