Intel has once again changed its mind about its top of the market line-up. The company has just launched Core i7 975 Extreme edition and Core i7 950 top performance SKU and it already has plans to replace it in Q4.

According to Intel's current plans, Core i7 960 comes in Q4 2009 and it should replace Core i7 950 and coexist with Lynnfield clocked at 2.93GHz, a CPU that still misses its brand.

Core i7 960 will run at 3.2GHz, but with 4.8 GT/s bus speed, has 8MB of L3 cache and its maximum turbo overclocking speed of single core is 3.46GHz. The CPU has the same 130W TDP as well as official support for only DDR3 800 and 1066 but as we said before, this is something to do with all Bloomfield CPUs rather than a single CPU glitch.

Core i7 960 is basically a crippled version of Core i7 965 as the 960 has the bus speed limited to 4.8GT/s compared to 6.4GT/s with Core i7 965 and the new 960 won't be multiplier unlocked. We suspect that the performance difference between Core i7 950 clocked at 3.06GHz and Lynnfield quad clocked at 2.93GHz was not big enough, and therefore Intel has to quickly replace Core i7 950.