Despite the enthusiasm to transition to 32nm, quad-cores in 2010 remain 45nm. Intel will continue to sell the mixture between old Nehalem 45nm generation of CPU and the new Nehalem, better known as Lynnfield 45nm CPUs.

Lynnfield was introduced in Q3 / Q4 2009 and Intel already plans to refresh this offer. Core i7 880 is planned for Q2 2010 and it runs at 3.06GHz with all four cores and eight hyperthreading treads and with the help of Turbo it can overclock to 3.73GHz.

Lynnfield has an improved memory controller as it can support DDR3 1066 and 1333MHz, while the first Nehalem can only officially support DDR3 800, 1066MHz. The CPU has 95W TDP and comes in LGA1156 socket, which naturally works 5 series chipset except X58 that wants LGA1366 processor.

This processor should coexist with Core i5 870 clocked at 2.93GHz that got introduced last year.