Intel Corp (INTC)

[ChipGeek]

Personally, I am eagerly awaiting to see if Intel's marketing does anything special in emphasizing Nehalem's Turbo Mode to differentiate this product from anything else that is out there.

I think this feature has the potential to spur much more quad-core demand on the desktop, and significantly raise ASPs.

Think about it - By spending more for a quad-core Nehalem, you are getting two bonuses for your money: extra performance now through higher frequency on single-threaded apps, and significantly higher performance later as more and more multi-threaded applications and games come online.

It's currently a hard sell for anything greater than 2 cores, because most folks know they won't get anything for their extra money; who needs 4 cores right now on the desktop? But with Nehalem, they will at least get a frequency/performance boost, and it might make that sell a little easier since they will be getting some tangible add-on value.

They could even go so far as to provide two frequency ratings, something like:

4C-2.8GHz/2C-3.4GHz

(btw these numbers are made up, I have no idea what Nehalem frequencies will look like).

What if you were to insert mid-range quad-core parts at the top of the price stack alongside the top-bin dual-core parts? As a very rough example, something like this:

 
 $1299          --           4C top-bin 
 $999           --           4C bin-1 
 $699        2C top-bin      4C bin-2 
 $499        2C bin-1        4C bin-3 
 $299        2C bin-2 
 

Using this stack as an example, the vast majority of folks in the mainstream space will go for a dual-core bin-2 for $299. Most folks won't shell out an extra $200 for merely one frequency bin above that. But maybe some will shell out an extra $200 to get a quad-core bin-3, if they know that if they won't use the extra cores then they will get that frequency bump anyway.

What I'm not sure about is if Intel or any OEMs will stress this feature in its marketing, or if this will simply be included in a long list of new features and left at that. I'm kind of hoping they use Turbo Mode to upsell their product line to OEMs and customers.