Sandy Bridge constitutes a lengthiness of Intel’s legendary tick / tock launching style whereby a clear design –in this case Nehalem and its Westmere derivatives- are slowly phased out in grace of a latest architecture.

This will be the initial step for altering the complete Nehalem lineup from Bloomfield to Lynnfield to Clarkdale but for some time Sandy Bridge processors will bring second fiddle to higher-end i7 Bloomfields. All of the present Clarkdale processors will change for EOL status starting rapidly and the latest processors will also take a huge chunk out of Intel’s Lynnfield lineup as well.