In an interview with Laptopmag, MSI's Director of US sales, Andy Tung, has revealed some interesting facts about the company's upcoming MacBook Air clones, the X320 and X340.

Apparently both will ship in April, and use the same chassis, but the X340 will come in two SKUs, and will be powered by Intel CULV single-core CPUs.

We've already talked about the X320, which is powered by the Atom Z530, so we will focus on the X340 instead. The X340 will launch with two SKUs, one will use the Intel Celeron M 725, while the more powerful flavor will be based on the Core 2 Solo SU3500.

The Celeron M 723 is clocked at 1.2GHz and has 1MB of L2 cache, while the Core 2 Solo SU3500 runs at 1.4GHz and packs 3MB of L2 cache. In May, these two SKUs will be joined by the 1.3GHz Core 2 Solo SU2700 and the Core 2 Solo SU9600. The CPUs will be coupled with GS40 and GS45 chipsets.

Tung says the pricing "is a little bit touchy now," but he expects the X340 to start at $750 with the Celeron. With more powerful, Core 2 Solo processors the price should go up to $999. The Atom based X320 isn't much cheaper, and it will retail at about $700. The small price difference will probably make the Celeron powered X340 a much better choice than the X320, although the Atom based machine will have superior battery life.

MSI tried to use Montevina in the X340 form factor, but opted to go with CULV instead, as it was facing potential thermal and battery life issues. The company will also use CULV on larger notebooks, and has already revealed some details on the X600, a 15.6-inch 16:9 notebook which supposedly weighs around 2kg.

The X320 and X340 are scheduled to ship in the second half of April, and will be available in white, black and gold colour options.

More here.

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