The boutique system builders at AVADirect tell us they've updated their professional server and workstation systems to now include Intel Xeon E5 processor options. Intel's E5 Xeon chips are based on the chip maker's Sandy Bridge-E architecture and come in quad-core, six-core, and eight-core flavors starting with the E5 2603 (four cores, 1.8GHz, 10MB cache, 80W TDP) on up to the E5 2690 (eight cores, 2.9GHz, 20MB cache, 135W TDP).

Feel free to run up and down your block screaming, "Ivy Bridge is coming! Ivy Bridge is coming!" That's not something you would have wanted to do prior to today, because if a fellow pedestrian grabbed you by the arm and demanded to know exactly when Ivy Bridge would roll into town, all you could have offered in return was a bunch of conflicting info. But in this day and age of the Internet, leaked slides are as commonplace as cockroaches in a dirty motel, and we found one that details precisely when Ivy Bridge will launch.

If you caught any of the coverage of Apple's iPad launch event yesterday -- and you couldn't have missed it unless you boycotted Facebook, Twitter, Google+, tech sites, and the Internet in general -- then you would have seen the Cupertino company puff out its chest as it talked about the new iPad's A5X processor, a mighty chip with supposedly four times the graphics performance of Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor. There's only one problem with that: Apple's scrumptious claim was served up without a side of benchmarks.