Intel’s upcoming Lynnfield core is based on the Nehalem architecture but adds in an integrated PCI Express 2.0 hub thereby officially nixing the north bridge from the world of PCs going forward.  The PCIe configuration can be setup as a single x16 connection or a pair of x8 ports for SLI and CrossFire solutions.  Lynnfield will still feature quad-cores running with HyperThreading to support eight total threads but the memory controller will be limited to dual-channel DDR3 rather than the triple-channel control we know of on the Core i7 parts. 

First tests of Intel Lynnfield creep up - Processors 3

Lynnfield will then connect to a south bridge chip through a DMI bus – QPI will not be a part of this mainstream CPU platform.

Expreview.com got some hands on time with an early sample running at 2.13 GHz and was able to sneak out some performance numbers – take these with a grain of salt considering the source but its always fun to speculate.  You can see a collection of random benchmarks at that site or just gander at the one I posted below:

First tests of Intel Lynnfield creep up - Processors 4

Intel is about to launch Lynnfield in Q3 2009 for mainstream market under $200. A friend from Taiwan ever unveiled some pictures of Lynnfield, and now the test finally emerges thanks to a Chinese website.

This test chooses 2.13G Lynnfield, DDR3-1066 (4G+2G) memory for laptops, ST 7200.2 160G HDD, PCI-E X1 NVS290 VGA Card and Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit OS.