Everyone seems to be expecting Haswell to debut around early June or thereabouts. If Intel’s going to hit that target, then kicking off shipments right about now would be timely.

The chipmaker may have done just that. CNet News quotes a "source close to the company" who claims Intel is now shipping Haswell processors. The news isn’t official yet, but it will be soon—Intel is expected to make an announcement at IDF Beijing later this week.

According to CNet’s source, Haswell processors are "shipping to customers now and will launch later this quarter." The source apparently neglected to mention which kinds of Haswell CPUs are rolling off production lines, but my money’s on desktop and standard-voltage mobile variants. The prevailing rumor about ultra-low-voltage Haswell processors—as Hardware.info reported in December—is that they won’t show up until later in 2013.

Oh, and remember that USB 3.0 bug we heard about in March? You know, the one that causes "issues" with USB 3.0 devices when the system awakens from an S3 sleep state? Well, Intel has officially confirmed it.

According to CNet, Intel admitted that affected chipsets will "be in production during the initial ramp." However, Intel added that there’s "no chance of data loss or corruption." The bug rears its head only with a "small subset" of USB 3.0 thumb drives and "does not affect other USB peripherals," the chipmaker says.