There seems to be hardly any difference between Corei5 and Corei7. Differences include:
1. quickpath on mobo not needed by i5 since its built in, unlike i7.
2. Only Dual Channel DDR3.
3. Option of On-Die GPU.
4. Mostly limited to single (physical) CPU per system.
5. LESSER POWER CONSUPTION.
all these appear either trivial ommitions for the end user or actually benificial. BUT....
6. Core i5 has disabled OverClocking support
Which means Phenom II would directly compete Core i5 in this respect, AND,
7. Core i5 STILL has HyperThreading enabled
Which means at default settings Core i5 would be better than Phenom II.
But yeah, you need to remember that
8. Core i5 would be much much cheaper compared to Core i5 and most propably Phenom II
Again giving an edge to Core i5.
But yeah, all this reminds me of the old battles between Athlon X2 4600+ and PD E2160. But Intel and AMD appear to switch places here, as in, intel is cheaper, faster at defaults, better memory strength, lesser (here its ZERO) overclockability, etc.
I would most propably choose PII over Ci5 if Ci5 would have ABSOLUTELY NO WAY of overclocking.
But fact remains, X58 prices are crashing fast and slipping below X48 levels. I wouldn't be surprised if most people prefer buying Core i7 920 along with a cheap X58 board in the near future when companies milk X58 and reduce it down to simple bare essentials - enabling only simple two card crossfire and having just three DDR3 memory slots to reduce cost, and people wouldn't mind this as long as Core i7 920 hits 4GHz stable on stock or basic air cooling
