Intel has dominated the high-end segment since the announcement of the Core i7 series of the Nehalem architecture. Even if AMD has made progress and brought forward its more competitive Phenom II family, it has remained a price/performance product. Both AMD and Intel knows that Phenom II can't compete with Core i7 in terms of raw performance, but through lower prices and cheaper motherboards AMD has been able to offer an affordable platform that competes with Intel's Core 2 architecture in the mid-range and performance segments.
The Core i7 processors, code-named Bloomfield, and not the least the LGA1366 platform as a whole has not been able to compete in term of price. That's where the LGA1156 platform and Lynnfield comes into the picture. Even if Lynnfield, as you will become aware of, actually contains more transistors than Bloomfield, Intel has lowered manufacturing costs of the processor and not the least the motherboard and platform as a whole.
Lynnfield cores
The base of Lynnfield is not very different from Bloomfield, but the few changes Intel has made are well thought-through and turn the LGA1156 platform into a more affordable/competitive product, not just in comparison to AMD's Phenom II family but also Intel's own high-end platform with the Bloomfield processors. The time has come for us to look at the details separating the two processor architectures and what makes Lynnfield such an interesting product.
