A fresh crop of ultrabooks sporting Intel's latest "Ivy Bridge" Core processors will start to go on sale next month, including 30 models with touchscreens, according to Intel.

What's this? An unannounced 14-inch Ultrabook called the Dell XPS 14 has popped up on Amazon. The specs suggest this superthin laptop will give other Ultrabooks a run for their money--it's got an Ivy Bridge processor, Nvidia discrete graphics, an HD+ display, and 12 hours of battery life.

Lenovo claims that its ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the world's lightest 14-inch Ultrabook, with a weight of just under 3 pounds. It's an easy claim to make, though, because the company doesn't have much competition in that size.

When Sony recently announced its first Ultrabooks, the Vaio T13 and Vaio T11, details for only the 13-inch model were provided, with no mention of pricing or Ivy Bridge processor availability for either model. Now German websites, including Sony's official German site, fills in those blanks.

The thin and light Samsung Series 9 Ultrabooks will be upgraded to Intel’s Ivy Bridge. The upcoming 15-inch laptop will sport a Core i5 3317U processor clocked at 1.7Ghz, according to a listing on Samsung’s site, but the company didn’t say when it would be available to buy, or for how much.

Intel's third-generation processor family - code-named Ivy Bridge - have been launched but the first round of 13 of the quad-core chips was reserved for high-end desktops and laptops. These first-round chips will not go in mainstream computers or even trendy Ultrabooks.

Intel's latest concept for an Ultrabook-tablet hybrid is beautiful, but it's not cheap.

The Samsung Series 5 Ultra is the company's first foray into the Ultrabook market (if you don’t count the Series 9, which predates the Ultrabook brand). There's just one problem: It weighs nearly 4 pounds, and measures 0.82 inch thick. In other words, this 14-inch laptop is closer to a regular ol' ultraportable than it is to an Ultrabook.

The Ultrabook, a new class of ultraportable laptops defined by Intel, has been making waves lately as the next major step in laptop design.