Anandtech i5 preview

[Shintai]

Yeah I hear you.It still up to AT to clarify what exactly was going on with BIOS settings on that lynnfield system.
As for i7 965,shouldn't the 920 have a bit higher Turbo boost kick compared to 965(which gets only "1" bin)?I ask since I think I read at i7 launch that 920 was to have the biggest boost from Turbo being the lowest clocked model(thus having more "headroom" than 2 higher end models,TDP wise).

No, they all have a predefined value in a linear scale. I actually think the retail 2.66Ghz got less turbomode headroom than the 2.8 and 2.93Ghz for Lynnfield. For i7 its all the same. 1x quad, 2x single/dual in C0 stepping.

All artificial limited ofcourse.

There could also be turbomode difference between C0 and D0 stepping. However I dont know and havent tested. But its worth noticing that Xeons (D0) got higher turbomode modes.

And the 920 by AT seems to be an old C0 ES sample for sure (Who knows how thats limited or not). Why dont they test with retail CPUs?

However its all starting to be a mess. Both from AMD and Intel.
Uncore speed differences. 200Mhz for example between AM2+ and AM3. And yet another 200Mhz between those and Opterons. Lynnfield also got a 133Mhz (I think) slower uncore than i7.
Then there is all the turbomode issue. A hot testlab could show poor results for example. Next is Hyperthreading etc.

And it certainly wont be easier in the future