For the past eleven and a half months, almost every ardent enthusiast running an X58-based Nehalem motherboard had undoubtedly heard of the wonderful advantages of running an Intel Core i7 920 for overclocking related purposes. While the legacy of this chip has only recently begun to rise in the hearts of the global consumer population, it is with great hope that we remain confident its performance will continue to endure into the 45nm generation of 2010.

Intel has recently confirmed plans to discontinue the Core i7 920 2.66GHz in order to make way for a even greater successor in the lineage, the Core i7 930 2.88GHz. It should be made clear that this is not recent news, considering the ubiquitous headlines back in June suggesting such an event to occur to the entire current Core i7 lineup. We have already witnessed the replacement of the Core i7 Extreme 965 3.20GHz with the 975 3.33GHz, the replacement of the Core i7 940 2.93GHz with the 950 3.06GHz, a few stepping revision updates along the way (C0/C1 to D0), and now this.

Just like its predecessor, the Core i7 930 2.88GHz will be a quad-core, eight-thread chip designed for socket LGA 1366. This last little detail is an interesting point considering the widespread notion of the LGA 1366 platform going “Extreme Edition only” throughout the entirety of 2010.

In terms of competitive pricing, it is likely that we may witness price reductions on both Core i7 860 and Core i7 870 socket LGA 1156 processors as Intel introduces its Core i7 860S and Core i7 870S low-power models with 65w TDP in Q1 2010.  These LGA 1156 chips were originally assumed by analysts to be the only remaining mainstream “Core i7” branded models on the market to survive the transition into 2010. However, this is obviously not the case and we can positively exclaim that the legacy of everyone’s enthusiast favorite LGA 1366 budget-minded CPU with incredible overclocking power will continue under a new name with greater performance as it makes its way into the beginning of a fresh new decade.