Core 2 Duo may not launch until September

Intel's eagerly anticipcated Conroe processor may not launch until September if the talk of the town proves to be true.

We have heard many suggestions about when Intel will launch its Core 2 Duo processors, but none of the suggested dates seemed to make sense to us. The only time frame that has been officially confirmed by Intel is when it expects to ship to its OEM customers.

This is expected to happen in July, but the date is not set in stone. At the same time, the company stated that it wanted to make sure its customers had ample time to build high quality machines in readiness for launch. This seems to back up what we've heard on the show floor.

If Intel was to ship its products to system integrators at the end of July, it would give them over a month to make sure that they were happy with, and ready to ship, Core 2 Duo-based systems as soon as Intel waves the green flag.

July also seems too soon for other chipset providers, too. This is because - apart from the reference designs - we have not seen a single motherboard design based on either ATI's RD600 / SB600 combination, or NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition.

Intel has been very open about how well Conroe performs; in fact, we were given the chance to benchmark a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor in Munich last month. The company was showing how well it performed on the P965 chipset at the 965 Express chipset launch yesterday, too.

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