Although these prices look very tempting, i'm still worried about their single thread performance.
You and everyone that's kept abreast of the dubious leaks that have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain.
However, at this point with the general mood being that BD will be an improvement over Phenom II that will perform around an I52500K for similar or less £/$, is IPC and single thread performance really that important at this price point? Lets be blunt, even a £85 Phenom II 955 is more than capable of handling everything you could reasonably throw at it in terms of normal media and games use to the point that the latest games aren't CPU limited unless they are badly optimized console ports. Not everyone is a gamer, but that's the single most CPU intensive task that the largest number of PC owners use their machines for (and a small percentage of the total market, lets be honest here- PC gaming is tiny compared to business and other non-leisure uses)
Does it matter if BD only performs
close to an I5 2500K in single-quad thread, when you probably aren't going to notice the difference and if its significantly cheaper to build a system around?
Average Joe isnt going to notice differences in performance that close- and he doesn't care whats in the box besides what marketing buzzwords get thrown at him like '8 cores!!!!'. Joe just wants to walk into a store and buy a PC that works.
Just my thinking aloud, accuracy and validity not guaranteed