To me, this sounds like we're finally starting to phase out all the Core2Duo E8400s that were so popular a few years back. For all the hype over how great a deal for high-end gaming the i5 2500K is, this is practically nowhere near what the E8400 got. Even though it had a locked multiplier, it still overclocked very well.
Of course, this shift to quad-cores doesn't mean a whole lot to most gaming, given that most games show no real benefit in moving beyond two cores, at least as of yet.[citation][nom]de5_roy[/nom]those are some nice numbers to look at. however, the ghz numbers are easy to misunderstand - intel's 2.7 ghz is roughly equivalent to amd's 3.2 ghz.amd's got some nice shares...quite possibly they have 100% lead in triple core segment.[/citation]
Given that Intel never really made a consumer-level 3-core CPU, that's not surprising.
As for comparing clock speeds, it depends way too much on the architecture: on the flip side, on a core-for-core basis, an old Northwood-era Celeron could clock 2.4 GHz, but would be inferior to even a 1 GHz Phenom II. That ratio you use only really works if you're looking at the CURRENT "enthusiast mainstream;" i.e, i5 & i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs vs. the Phenom II or FX. Obviously, the Pentium and Celeron lines get noticeably worse performance-per-clock, and even among Steam users likely account for a large portion of the market. (as Gamers != Enthusiasts)
[citation][nom]SteelCity1981[/nom]this is why intel is stopping at 4 cores at the moment and not going 6 or 8 in their mainstream,because the market as of now clearly shows that quad cores is where the main stream market is right now and even 4 cores is plenty of cores for most users at the moment.[/citation]
Well, it's not entirely this, actually. Rather, it's Intel's design philosophy, which clearly shows from die photographs, is that they're focusing less on "more cores," and more on the "uncore." Looking at a Sandy Bridge CPU reveals that the actual die area taken up by cores is a small minority: non-core fixed-function units (such as the memory controller, various extra accelerators, not to mention the embedded GPU in the SB chips) take up a much more significant portion of the die space compared to Nehalem, and even moreso compared to Core 2.
AMD appears to be taking the opposite approach: aside from integrating the NorthBridge into the CPU, the FX-series focuses a lot less of the non-cache part of the die on the "un-core" stuff, and in fact appears to remain relatively close to the level found with the older Phenoms and Athlons.
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