Intel’s own claims that its Ivy Bridge platform had been moved back to June might have been unintentionally conservative. New leaks on Saturday to Digitimes had the 22-nanometer processors shipping in late April, setting them back only by a few weeks. As expected, the initial supply would be higher-end Core i5 and i7 processors.
Fierce competition among top-end competitors could see Windows-based ultrabooks get valuable price drops on their next-generation systems, going as low as $799 to $899. Most in the first have have had trouble going below the baseline $999 set by Apple’s MacBook Air, even if they can sometimes offer more RAM or drive space.
The detailing also implied a much wider range of ultrabook-friendly processors than before that would be Ivy Bridge-based, although the site possibly called its own rumors into question through the processor list. All of them were billed as 2000-series chips, the naming scheme it has been using for current Sandy Bridge designs. Intel’s own leaked product sheets have referred to 3000-series processors that have clocked as high as 2GHz.
