Several distributors and retailers are showing that Intel's upcoming Core i7 975 will ship at the beginning of April, not the end of May.

Is the Intel Core i7 975 coming sooner than we think? That's what many distributors and retailers are reporting, and actually have the upcoming processor listed for next month. As an example, this website shows an April 6 street date, and this website shows an estimated date of April 7. Granted, these dates aren't official, and are estimates only. However, it's a huge jump considering that the Core i7 975 wasn't expected to ship until the end of May.

The release of the 45nm Core i7 975 (Extreme) is a rather highly-anticipated one, as the quad-core Bloomfield processor will serve as the new flagship chip for Intel, boasting a core speed of 3.33 GHz, support for LGA 1366 sockets, uses 1 MB of L2 cache and 8 MB of L3 shared cache memory, and has a TDP of 130W. Recently the processor was leaked, overclocked, and benchmarked, pushed up to an "extreme" clock core speed of 5,239 MHz, breaking the then-current record of Futuremark's 2DMark05 benchmark application. As it stands now, the benchmarked rig featuring the Core i7 975 sits in the #2 position, recently conquered by a rig sporting Intel's Core i7 965.

As of this writing, the Intel Core i7 975 will cost end-users a whopping $999 USD; the Core i7 950, clocking in at 3.06 GHz, will be available as well for a cheaper-but-still-hefty $562 USD. Other processors included in the original May lineup consist of the Core 2 Duo E7600 ($84), the Pentium Dual-Core E6300 ($84), and the Celeron Dual-Core E1600 ($53).

Intel also plans to ship six Core 2 Quad processors next month.