Intel's latest roadmap implies that you should see Nehalem generation of processors, codenamed Bloomfield in Q4 2008. In this quarter, Intel plans to launch Bloomfield, a native quad core with eight threads. In Q4 2008 Bloomfield has to coexist with QX9700, faster generation of 45nm Yorkfield clocked to 3.2GHz.

There is an indication that Intel might change its mind and launch a faster Yorkfield, but this mainly depends from AMD’s performance in 2008.

 

In Q1 2009 Intel plans to move to Bloomfield only and this is of course, reserved for the most expensive and most exciting Extreme market segment. Intel also plans to have performance and mainstream versions of Nehalem.   

Intel looks strong in 2009 and it looks that AMD will have a very tough task to compete Intel in 2009 and AMD’s biggest hope today is that Nehalem will have some issues. Nehalem looks good on paper and we’ve seen a working version at Intel developers forum back in September 2007, but obviously the chip we’ve seen was far from a fully functional production ready part.