Bloomfield, Core i7 CPUs are definitely the best CPUs that Intel has ever made, but it doesn't look like it will sell that many of them.

Lynnfield will make the Nehalem platform a bit more popular, but only after cheaper boards based on P55 and other chipsets are introduced, and Clarkdale will get Nehalem to an even broader market.

The X58 was and remains the ultra high end platform and there are only a few X58 based motherboards available under ?200. The Core i7 platform market share won't grow in 2009, it will actually shrink.

According to Intel chipset sales guidance in Q1 1.8 percent of total chipset sales will be X58 and in Q2 this number will already drop to 1.7 percent of all shipments. In Q3 X58 chipset will further drop to 1.3 percent of total
shipment and in Q4 2009, X58 will drop to 1.15 percent of market.

We believe that Intel pushed the prices a tad too high, and that people simply want cheaper Nehalems and platforms before Core i generation becomes really attractive.

When you take this to account, AMD's Phenom II X4 Deneb based CPUs still have a good chance, despite their lower performance, as the price of the platform and performance per buck is definitely on AMD's side.