Quote Originally Posted by Glow9 View Post
This is absolutely stupid. I am not going to be one bit surprised to see i7 get chopped. Q9550 and Q9650 which can perform almost as good as their high end i7's it just seems like they are fighting against themselves not to mention pricing. Now adding a 3rd socket into the mix.

Who's the brains behind this one? Hey I got an idea! lets create a line of overpriced niche cpu's that perform about as well as our highend affordable ones! But just wait it gets better! Now lets add a 3rd socket which is between the two already and make that one perform as good if not better than the high end overpriced niche ones too!

Anyone ever see Robin Williams how golf got created standup? This comes to mind.
That third socket = reduction in power usage, and overall platform efficiency increases... which for any threaded applications beat out the core2 by a decent margin, only in gaming are things close, and that is either a gpu bottleneck or lack of threaded coding that keeps things close. :/ They are not really niche items, they are a methodical tick tock progression..