So Intel has fully announced Nehalem will be arriving at the end of the year. Nehalem essentially makes Core 2 technology outdated and retired the instant it hits the streets, finally retiring Intel's FSB. The first wave of Nehalem's are supposed to be 45nm with the Westmere 32nm processors rolling out thereafter, if I understand it correctly.

Just like the Core platform, the new Nehalem is expected to trump Core anywhere from 50-230% improvement. I'm curious why Intel just pushed out the X48/P45 chipset this quarter with a deadline so close behind to kill it for good.

Tick Tock!

P45 actually comes out June 2~ looks like all it supports is PCE2.0 and ICH10R, optionally DDR3 with speeds up to 1600MHz. A lot of the new P45 boards are interesting though~ Gigabit has the board with quad GigE onboard and PCIe switching on southbridge while Asus has the hardware raid chip, their fast gate, and 802.11n onboard.

onboard memory controller is nice but DDR3 is still too expensive to be viable...