All in all, the new Core i7 platform has more going for it than AMD ever did with its socket 940 thanks to greater industry support from enthusiast memory and multi-GPUs, however even the cheapest Core i7 920 processor isn't cheap if we consider what we're paying for E8400s, E5200s or the super popular Q6600s. We can only cry at the loss of extreme-value overclocking - many of the most successful overclockers in the world started out as teenagers and students learning the ropes by killing very cheap CPUs (an AMD Duron 750 for £35 here), so what will this mean for future generations? Only if you have money to play and "burn," can you be a big hit?

With Nvidia pushing its CUDA GPGPU "mass multi-core" as the way forward - such examples are its Badaboom, Folding@Home and the hugely important Adobe Creative Suite 4, a few of us doubt that Nehalem can be such a firm hit its predecessors were in the desktop market. However, then we remember it's not all about the GFLOPS - it's about ease of use with the millions of x86(-64) programs already available. Intel's competitor will continue to be AMD, not Nvidia, and we encourage digesting our performance analysis article in detail as well as keeping an eye on how well the new Core i7 920 CPUs overclock (and how the soon-to-be-released AMD Deneb CPUs perform) to see if your current setup should be retired or not. The CPU as we know it today will stick around and be very important for a while yet still.