Semiconductor giant Intel has recently released its latest line of quad-core processors, the “Lynnfield” Core i7 and the Core i5. Launched on Intel’s ‘cheaper’ mainstream socket the LGA-1156 rather than the more expensive LGA-1366 like the “Bloomfield” i7s, these processors have been priced with value in mind and takes Intel’s price-point rivalry with AMD’s Phenom II quad-core processors to a whole new level.

The initial Lynnfield line is based on 45nm wafer manufacturing technology and consists of two flavours, the Core i7: 870 rated at 2.93GHZ, 860 rated at 2.80GHZ and the Core i5: 750 rated at 2.66GHZ and costing $562, $284 and $196 respectively. The main difference between the two apart from the clock speed is the lack of hyper-threading in the Core i5 processor. This has merely been done to limit its performance compare to its bigger brothers and hence justify their higher cost.

The main star among these three is the Core i5: 750. Yes, it’s a crippled version of the new Lynnfield Core i7 but priced much lower at only $196, which is amazing value for a high performance quad-core processor. Its main competitor is the AMD’s Phenom II x4 965 BE which is priced at around $50 more and yet the 750 manages to out-shine it in almost every application, game and benchmark making it exceptionally good value for the money and arguably the best bang-for-buck processor, yet.

AMD really needs to reconsider its pricing strategy if it wants to keep its chances of staying in the medium-high processor range alive.