Intel is about to showcase many P55 based motherboards as in Q3, it plans to ship Lynnfield Quad core with eight tread CPUs. These should save Nehalem's hide as Lynnfield will have much more reasonable price and it will be aiming at much faster adoption and a broader market.

The socket has pins inside and a retention mechanism looks similar to LGA1366 socket that we’ve seen on Core i7 series. Since Lynnfield and Havendale have dual channel memory controller, you don’t need all 1366 pins as with Bloomfield socket 1366. 1156 pins should be enough for dual channel memory and a GPU, as GPU will find its way to Havendale dual core with IGP CPU, but of course this is only in Q1 2010.

Here is how the socket looks and the boards based on P55 should be available by the end of Q3, some suggest September.