Intel says it will start unwrapping its Centrino 2 widgetry on July 14 with the introduction of its Core and Extreme mobile processors and initial shipments of some of its chipsets instead of on June 24 like it was supposed to.

It says it will ship its complete line of chipsets and wireless chips in high volume a couple of weeks later during the first week of August.

An Intel spokesman said in an e-mail that “We are taking the extra days to address two issues that require us to re-screen our chipsets with integrated graphics, and attend to some ‘Ts and Cs’ (terms and conditions) mistakes while filing and testing our wireless  antennas.

“This couple of week delay does not change our outlook for the second quarter. These laptops are in high demand and this is an important introduction for everyone involved. We’re doing our best to make sure we meet the critical back-to-school buying time and also have a high state of readiness of all of our products to best meet demand."

People started to get antsy about the Centrino 2 platform launch following reports that Intel had muffed its FCC certification, which could slow down 802.11n Wi-Fi adoption, and that it was having problems with the integrated graphics in the Montevina platform that caused failures at notebook OEMs.

It remains unclear how much of the line is affected though the two-week delay suggests it’s not much and that AMD’s rival Puma platform won’t get much joy out of it.

In reflecting on the scuttlebutt American Technology Research analyst Doug Freedman said last Friday, “We believe the potential impact is to lower-end systems as higher-end notebooks are designed with discrete graphics cards. In fact, the impact on Intel is a possible improvement in mix within the chipset business; however, it is offset by the yield loss related to the functional issues.”