Chief Nehalem architect Ronan Singhal has confirmed that you can expect at least four different versions of Nehalem processors.

This is nothing new, as Intel has talked about this at IDF; but again, it’s good to know what comes in the future.

Core i7 is the high-end and first to come and there will be at least two other iterations of Nehalem in 2009 within the dual and quad-core market. It is much easier to make a new iteration of a core with Nehalem as L3 cache size is something that can be changed and memory controller can be adjusted and changed. You can also play with QPI and clock part of the CPU, while the Cores themselves remain the same.

Some CPUs will have triple channel memory while the others will have e.g., dual, and even single is possible. L3 cache will be variable and this will directly affect performance of the future Nehalems.

The bottom line is that Nehalem will end up in dual, quad and later possibly even an eight-core CPU, but it's more likely to see eight-core with 32nm Westmere in late 2009.