Apple iMac: Now With Unannounced Intel Processors!

Intel’s Core 2 Duo Extreme X9100 is shipping in “limited quantities,” all right. Quantities limited to Apple.

The Apple (AAPL) Web site went offline for a bit this morning, and when it returned it featured a handful of new iMacs, all of them apparently running Intel’s (INTC) as-of-yet unannounced X9100 Montevina processor. Priced between $1,199 and $2,199, the latest iteration of Apple’s iconic all-in-one system features the same enclosure as its predecessors, outfitted with the most powerful graphics cards yet available on the system and Core 2 Duos running at 2.4GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.8GHz and 3.06 GHz. All four have 1066MHz front-side buses and 6MB of L2 cache, configurations curiously absent from Intel’s current price list but expected to debut with Intel’s Montevina refresh.

How is it that Apple’s able to ship machines running unannounced Intel product? Perhaps the company’s designed its product roadmap to dovetail perfectly with Intel’s. Or, perhaps, Apple’s agreement with Intel is another of CEO Steve Jobs’s sweetheart-of-a-deal masterpieces that gives the company early access to Intel’s newest chips.