Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz vs. Lynnfield 2.66Ghz
 

Who are the Core i5? Although some of the upcoming Intel is likely to keep bouncing the CPU is still expressed doubts about the naming, but we give you today are brought about by conservative Core i5 and accurate or that the core Lynnfield evaluation CPU Core . Computex Taipei last week, the various motherboard manufacturers have demonstrated a new generation of 5 Series chipsets, Intel plans in accordance with the fourth quarter of 2009 will bring Lynnfield listed on the first P55 P57, which is following the Bloomfield core, after the Core i7 listed, Nehalem family of revolutionary products and a heavyweight debut.


http://publish.it168.com/2009/0609/20090609001101.shtml

Test has been done with HT on, and since retail i5 will not have HT enabled is this not a good comparison.

in real world HT doesn't matter much with Nehalem; 4 threads is plenty of power and very few apps can take advantage of more than 2 cores.

do note that ONLY entry level i5 won't have HT (2.66) from model 2.8Ghz and up HT is enabled! (trying to find table, but XS is down)

found it:



if you see 4 cores/4 threads = HT disabled
4 cores/8 threads= HT enabled

so out of 3 models, 2 have HT enabled

"In real world" is an overly broad statement. Those users that run multiple workloads to take advantage of all 8 threads will see the increases in performance.

Anyone can run 8 threads of Folding@home and gain half again the performance, is why Core i7 chips have such a higher PPD over Core 2 Quads.

F@H is hardly a widely used app compared to something like Word;
and how many times do you actually do multiple workloads simultaneously which could justify an additional 4 threads over the 4 you already have;
most can hardly stress a dual core CPU...

How so? People don't buy Core I7's only to disable HT and suffer a performance loss. And people considering I5's know what to expect now compared to a Core I7. "Clock for Clock".

Now if you want to compare for synthetic benchmarking (3DMark06, PCMark Vantage, Wprime ect) well that's different.

F@H was just a personal example. Users only running office apps + web browsers for the most part aren't going to be paying extra for Quadcore anything. ;)

Typical users are running a dozen small single-thread programs on their PCs while they surf the web and download files, maybe play a 1-2 threaded game while that stuff still running in the background.

DualCore can handle all that with ease :)
so no reason to argue for 8-threaded CPU