Why do people keep saying that Intel is either "field testing" or "beta testing" when they release new CPU's? I am sure that the multi-billion dollars they spend on R&D and testing covers that.

Just because some people can afford the newest and recently released CPU's (Video cards, etc) does not mean that they are testing the companies products. Yes there are some exceptions (5800 comes to mind) however it's not the norm.

It sure will be interesting to see where 'i5' (or whatever they name it) is priced. If the rumours are correct it would make no sense, since its basically a slightly cut down cheaper i7.

I think i5 will be faster than i7 in single-threaded applications because it has superior turbo mode

Hey Apple:

Macbook Pro w/ Clarksfield plz kthxbye.

Piednoel noted that the "Core i5" name concocted by the rumor mill is simply off—the final product will be called something else entirely, although he wasn't at liberty to say what.

Let me guess... something involving "Pentium," "Extreme!" or some stupid word Intel made up "Viiv!" Oh, and they'll probably throw "Green" or "Hybrid" in there just because it's the trendy thing to do.

Oh boy if only they'd bring back the precious turbo button to enable that Turbo Boost(TM) feature!

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3104/2446374749_f5044a2333.jpg?v=0

I thought the rumor mill said no HT in the i5 lineup? Guess that's wrong.

Since Win 7 is coming out, '7' must figure promptly in the name.

How about Super Socket Core i7 ?

We won't elaborate about the contents (or the topic) of the card, but we did get to snap a picture of the CPU. Behold:

I'm guessing it was an in-your-face missive to AMD's Opteron, or possibly the Power guys at IBM?

Similar to the Core 2 architecture where the top end was called Core 2, the middle was Pentium and the low end was Celeron, the same should apply here.
With the i7 as the top, that would make the so called i5 the Pentium line.
Now as there are 4 cores, they can just call these CPUs Pentium 4 or P4 for short.

You know, that (stupidly named) Turbo Boost may be the best thing that's ever happened to the aftermarket cooler industry. Prior to this, unless you were a tweak-happy overclocker the stock coolers were always fine. But now just buying and installing a better cooler can automatically lead to higher performance, no BIOS fiddling required. The OEMs will probably be all over that too, since it will be allow them to advertise clockspeeds "as high as X.Y GHz" (with lots of footnoted caveats).

The "turbo boost" speed increase is more likely to be 25-50%, and not all of it is going to be from a clock speed increase. With only one core being used, wouldn't it have more CPU cache to play with? Less RAM/bus contention, too.

Turbo boost could eliminate the only thing holding consumers back from buying multi-core CPUs: single-threaded performance in games and other applications.

We'll see how it all pans out :)

It does make sense because the platform costs of motherboard and memory for the i7 processor places it in a higher market segment.