The cheapest Nehalem-EP based Xeon will start selling in the last days of March for $285. We are talking about Xeon W3520, which will run at 2.66GHz. Just as any Nehalem CPU, it comes with 8MB of L3 cache and uses Intel's LGA 1366 socket.

Currently we don’t see any plans for lower speed Nehalems, and we believe that this CPU will do very well in the server world.

A somewhat faster version is the quad-core Xeon Q3540 which runs at 2.93GHz, has 8MB L3 cache, has 4.8GT/s QPI links and will sell for a wholesale price of $555.

The CPU that we've already mentioned, Xeon W3570, will run at 3.20GHz and will sell for $990. In theory, it will cost just about as much as a Core i7 CPU at the same speed.

Moreover, these CPUs should be available for purchase on March 28th.