Intel To Postpone Mass Shipments Of Ivy Bridge Processors

A bit of unhappy news for fans Jonesing for new Mac hardware, == Digitimes’ Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai report that Intel recently notified its industry partners that it plans to postpone mass shipments of its upcoming Ivy Bridge processors.

They say unnamed sources at notebook-maker OEM tell them Intel will still announce the new Ivy Bridge silicon and ship a small volume of the processors in early April, but that mass shipments are not expected to occur until after June.

Chen and Tsai suggest the hold-up may be due to first-tier PC notebook vendors having trouble unloading their Sandy Bridge CPU based notebook inventories due to the weak global economy, and that Intel itself is consequently “troubled” by its own Sandy Bridge processor inventory backlog, hence an imposed delay in aid of clearing old stock.

The report says that with Intel changing its launch schedule, notebook vendors are revising their project timetables for new Ivy Bridge models, projecting that a hoped-for PC replacement trend is unlikely to get underway until after September, when Microsoft is expected to launch Windows 8, making the first three quarters of 2012 “a dark period” for the notebook industry.

That would be except for Apple, of course, with its hot-selling MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptop lines. However, it stands to throw a proverbial monkey-wrench into Apple’s rumored release plans for a major, Ivy Bridge powered, redesign of both categories, that had been anticipated by some commentators for as early as April. That now seems optimistic, to say the least.

For the full report visit here:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120215PD215.html