Looking for a good article to help me understand current gen CPUs

[The Sauce]

My last build was about 3 years ago when C2Ds were all the rage and quads were just getting out. I have been lurking and reading for about 3 months in anticipation of a new build sometime in the near future and can not seem to get a grasp on what is going on in the processor market at the moment. Seems very confusing. i3, i5, i7, some have 4 cores, some have 2 cores with multithreading which may or may not be better, some say the AMD Phenoms are better but they are half the price of the Intel chips which does not make sense, some Phenoms have 2, 3, or 4 cores, black editions (whatever that is)... Nothing is simple anymore like when they used to just name the processor after the clock speeds...sigh.

Is there a good, recent article anyone knows about where they summarize the current processor market? I'm getting frustrated.

 

[ther00kie16]

Articles don't normally summarize info. If you want specs such as # of cores, hyperthreading (HT), virtualization (VT) etc, check out wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_future_Intel_microprocessors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_future_AMD_Phenom_microprocessors

For CPU tasks, you'll want intel. For balanced tasks such as gaming, GPU tends to be the major factor so the slower Phenom II can do reasonably well compared to intel when paired with the same GPU. For extremely cpu intensive tasks, you'll want i7 because of the HT feature.
Currently available i5 750 is a quad core without HT. Future i3 and i5 will all be dual core with packaged GPU. i3 doesn't have HT while i5 does.
Here's some info on effect of HT:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057-12.html
There was another article recently that mentioned a fast i5 dual core w/ HT would be on par with a slower quad core without HT but I don't remember where it is.

Edit: I knew it was on anandtech
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3648&p=7