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Intel is planning on shipping the Dual-Core Sandy Bridge chips for laptops starting on February 20th, 2011.
The first Sandy Bridge processors to ship were quad-core chips, mainly for high-end laptops. The dual-core chips will likely go into end-user and ultraportable laptops, many of which were shown at last month's Consumer Electronics Show. Fujitsu said it plans to use dual-core Core i7 chips in its high-end ultraportable laptops.
The Dual-Core chips are likely upgrades for the existing MacBook Pro line which is due for updates. The Sandy-Bridge CPUs were described as the next generation replacement CPU with significantly improved integrated graphics performance and better performance/power ratios.
The remaining question is how the "design flaw" found in some of the early Sandy Bridge controllers will ultimately affect the production and availability of these new chips. The issue didn't directly affect the CPUs, but affected SATA-II connectors found on the chipsets. Like other computer manufacturers, Apple uses Intel's chipsets to interconnect their CPUs to the rest of the computer. Intel has announced that they would begin shipping fixed chipsets by mid-February.
