Uhhhhhh elbert - care to include what else was said about that 2% boost?
"Cinebench shows us only a 2% increase in core-to-core performance from Penryn to Nehalem at the same clock speed. For applications that don't go out to main memory much and can stay confined to a single core, Nehalem behaves very much like Penryn. Remember that outside of the memory architecture and HT tweaks to the core, Nehalem's list of improvements are very specific (e.g. faster unaligned cache accesses)."
As we saw with AMD's K7 to K8 overhaul, there are big improvements, and 2% on benchmarks, they wanted to see what the core was like compared to the last - pretty much the same with an IMC and no FSB etc.
What you dont seem to realize is for EVERY home user when there pc there isnt just one heavy app running (and zero benifit etc), there are hundereds - windows alone which can load across all the threads (services etc), antivirus, msn, download apps (torrents), hardware monitoring, drivers etc - the extra threads and performance comes in handy for everone, and its not as if this thing is slower then the last or anything.
Count me in for one of these new beasts, dunno bout you freaks but id like that extra performance and the prices sound about right.