By Joel Hruska
September 05, 2008 - 02:08PM CT

Companies typically keep a fairly tight lid on their roadmaps; updates tend to either be carefully controled or "accidentally" leaked. Leaked roadmaps, official or not, always run the risk of being wrong, but there's a new series of Intel updates making the rounds that certainly could be right, based on what we know about the CPU manufacturer's plans.

Keep in mind, however, that all roadmaps are subject to legitimate change. The roadmaps below might be perfectly accurate for what Intel currently plans to do within the 2008-2010 time frame, but the company always has the right to change its mind. PCWatch published a set of diagrams, including multiple Nehalem breakdowns if you want to see how the Lynnfield, Havendale, Westmere, and Bloomfield cores compare to each other.

In this article, we'll focus on Intel's overall roadmap through 2010, as well as recap some information on Atom you may have missed the first time around. Remember, however, nothing here is official until Intel says it's official. All of the current projections are accurate, and they show how well Intel has currently seeded the market with strong value parts—Intel's E7300 (2.6GHz Wolfdale, 3MB L2) is significantly faster than its ranking in "Essential" would indicate, for example.

Moving into Q4, we see Nehalem's launch (Bloomfield-only, and only down as far as "Mainstream 3." Save for the new Core i7 introduction, that's pretty much it for Intel until the end of Q2/early Q3. At that time, Intel launches a full Nehalem-flavored lineup, and pushes Core 2 all the way to the "Value 2" segment. At this point, it appears that Intel will push current Core 2 Duo technology into the Celeron line, and stretch Nehalem-class products into all other segments.