Bloomfield 3.20GHz - 990$
Bloomfield 2.93GHz - 555$
Bloomfield 2.66GHz - 285$

Seeing as clock for clock the Bloomfield was up to 20% faster than Core 2 Duo, at 2.66Ghz with HT enabled, we're looking at a very very affordable server CPU.

This is based off the same source as http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15110 yes?

Still wanting to confirm this officially, but is very good news. Cheaper than the $334 I was hoping for.

got no real source for those numbers , might well be that site yes

But isn't the cheap one a dual-channel , 1066 only?

You think this is going to make much of a performance difference?

the Core 2 Duo was never really bandwidth starved as pairing it with high speed DDR2 or DDR3 never really boosted performance much, not even with the latest Quad Cores or 45nm Wolfdales.

Now the Bloomfield is a quad core with HT enabled which means it can occupy the physical CPU constantly as the software CPUs (hyperthreaded ~ my simplified explanation) keep finding them data. For single threaded applications I'm not expecting large differences, only in multithreaded applications there will be a measureable difference (speculation!!).

Server wise with multiple sockets we'll see the largest benefit, as these memory sticks will be configured as triple-channel configs (if I read that correctly) and will provide a lot of bandwidth to feed the cores with data.

now this is all speculation as the only tests currently done with Nehalem are single channel, we'll have to wait for triple channel results before making any final calls.

LGA1160 is the cheap socket and those are dual-channel. All LGA1366 chips are triple-channel. Extreme edition is 1333 rated, others are rated for 1066 but most likely offer unofficial 1333+ support.