The rumor mill can't seem to make up its mind about when Intel's new Ivy Bridge chips are going to make their official debut. In the past few weeks, we've heard about delays, a staggered roll out of new product, and most recently, a rumor that Intel is pulling in the Ivy Bridge curtain-raiser by a week to help its OEM partners get their new Ultrabooks on the market as soon as possible.
The last, most credible report we heard about the debut of the next-generation, 22-nanometer processors sporting Tri-Gate goodness was that Intel was planning to release a whole bunch of them on April 29. That juicy bit of information came from some leaked Intel slides rounded up by CPU World that also included basic speeds-and-feeds data for a dozen new Core i7 and Core i5 parts ranging in price from $184 to $1,096.
But on Thursday, DigiTimes, citing its usual anonymous supply chain sources, reported that while an April 29 Ivy Bridge launch was in fact the original plan, Intel has moved up that date to April 23 to accommodate partners like Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard who are raring to go with snazzy new Ultrabooks using Ivy Bridge chips.
Intel hasn't officially announced when its third-generation Core processors will be made available.
The stage is certainly set for the introduction of Ivy Bridge and for a big marketing push for the second generation of thin-and-light Ultrabooks.
Intel this week made its 7-series chipsets for notebooks and desktops using its current-generation Core processors as well as the new Ivy Bridge parts available to OEM partners. The new platform supports USB 3.0 and features Intel responsiveness technologies like Smart Response, Smart Connect, and Rapid Start.
Meanwhile, there was a report earlier this month that HP was planning to launch new Ivy Bridge laptops as early as this week—that obviously didn't come about, but it does point to quite a bit of excitement over this launch.
On the Ultrabook front, Intel executive Kirk Skaugen made waves at the Intel Developer Forum in China earlier in the week with a prediction that sub-$700 Ultrabooks would hit the market by this summer. It certainly seems possible that to hit that price target, OEMs might use older, Sandy Bridge-generation chips that could get a price cut when the new Ivy Bridge parts come out.