Quoting Thrax

My personal opinion on this one:

1. Anyone who currently owns a Bloomfield should simply overclock their chip, pair it with some good DDR3-1600 (or better), and watch the Lynnfield run away crying. The two chips may offer the same core frequencies and memory speeds, but that extra memory channel and wider PCIe bus will put Bloomfield ahead.

2. Anyone looking to buy into the Nehalem should wait for Westmere. It makes the entire Lynnfield vs. Bloomfield debate obsolete: More cores, cooler cores, faster cores, and more overclockable cores will put Westmere ahead of both Bloomfield and Lynnfield, and it's only five months away.

Nice overview of the differences, agree with #1 as that will essentially negate the artificial gains from an improved Turbo mode on Lynnfield. I probably would've broke out the PCIE lane and bandwidth advantage to a #3 though, as the disparity in bandwidth may become more of an issue with this next-generation of GPUs (Cypress and Fermi), particularly the X2 variants.

As for #2, I don't agree with that based on current leaked roadmaps. 32nm Westmere is looking to be the most insignificant Tick cycle on Intel's Tick Tock mfg. cadence ever from a mainstream performance POV. Currently, it only has plans on the extreme high-end with the 6C Gulftown and the low-end with a 2C Clarkdale. There's no direct transition or die shrink planned for 4C Lynnfield and Bloomfield, so unless you want to spend $1000+ for the XE Gulftown, current 4C offerings are probably as good as its going to get until 32nm Sandy Bridge, which will be the Tock sometime in late 2010 or early 2011.

My major problem with Intel's current socket fiasco is that the feature that was most responsible for bifurcating the high-end and mainstream sockets, tri-channel over dual-channel memory, offers the least benefit in actual performance. Its understandable why they went with QPI, for the additional bandwidth in the server storage and 2P market (which also gave gamers another 20 PCIE lanes), but I would've much rather had a single unified LGA1188 (figure the QPI is about 32 pins and traces, 240 pins for DDR3, can check Intel's whitepapers for exact pin specs) or whatever instead of the two platform Intel solution we have now.