Ivy Bridge for Ultrabooks The one thing missing at the launch of Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPU technology was detail on the dual-core and lower powered chips for the mobile market segment, in particular, for its Ultrabook concept. The recent launch of the ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) and dual-core standard voltage mobile Ivy Bridge parts has revealed all, with the …
Obviously pretty damn quick - the same as other processors in 'recent' memory. However don't forget that with Word 2, that when you try and save and it comes up without the 'can't save because of resources error', all you have to do is cut and paste the document, close word, load up a different text oriented application, and paste - then save. Top tip circa 1994-6.
I'd just moved on from Wordperfect 5.2 in a DOS box around then, skipping up to Word 6 at around 95... always remembered the "Help for Wordperfect Users" option in that. Embrace indeed.
Numbers needed - nice graph or chart - the benchmarks move on apace - today's PCMark on it's own needs more RAM and disk space than the old system ever had in total...
There are plenty of Ivy Bridge ULV based Ultrabooks on the market for quite a while. And here you come testing an Intel whitebook exclusively against last year's Sandy Bridge Ultrabooks, while everybody else has moved on to comparing Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks against other Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks... your point?
Intel should make the 1600x900 a minimum requirement for 13" models.
That's fairly unambitious. If an iPad can have 2048x1536 on a 9.7" display I would hope to see something like 2700x2000 on a 13-incher.
Still, you did say minumum ... and the important thing is to get away from those $DEITY-awful 1366x768 things.
The HD 4000 has no issue whatsoever in displaying 2D imagery across 3 high resolution monitors simultaneously. (the Ultrabook's own display and 2x 30" Dell Monitors hooked up via VGA and HDMI)
But when it comes to displaying 3D stuff, you're best off not going past 1366x768, cause its already stressed at that resolution.
Now, this is no argument against a higher resolution screens on 13.3" notebooks, like 1600x900, cause for 3D stuff, you can just scale to a lower resolution. Also remember that, while Windows itself will scale up for higher resolutions, a lot of windows applications fail to properly support such scaling. So, you don't want to go to ridiculous, "retina" like resolutions. Higher resolutions than you really need waste computing resources built into the unit.
Going higher than 1600x900 on 11.6" screens or 1080p on 13.3" screens is a pretty pointless waste imho.
Having said that, 1366x768 on screens over 10" should be made illegal...
When you under power and over charge for a shiny, almost worthless toy, most people are going to just say "NO" and that's what's happening to Intel's joke for an Ultrabook. AMD and it's customers are the winner here so it's all good. If you must have a shiny, worthless toy, then bend over and buy a BadBook. Intel will thank you for being so foolish as they laugh all the way to the bank.
I softened though when I saw the price and power.
How can these things compete in mobile space with ARM SoCs that cost way less than $50 and only use 1 or 2 watts?
It seems to me Intel's playing field is getting smaller and smaller. At some stage it will disappear.
You make this discussion sound even more like an echo to stuff thats been talked about months ago.
Its not about "daring" to put a dedicated GPU, if anything, its about a possilbe waste of money, since the HD 4000 takes up quite a bit of real estate on the chip.
But for one thing, there's a variety of Manufacturers already putting dedicated GPUs in their Ultrabooks. (Asus: GT 620M in the Zenbook U32VD, Acer: GT 64M LE in the M5, Gigabyte: GT 640M in the U2442N, there's others as well)
And with the HD-4000 and Optimus, you can still save power, by only turning on the dedicated GPU when the Intel HD GPU can't hack it, which is a widely known old hat.
So I think your argument may become valid if Intel keeps making their integrated GPU bigger without really getting the performance to make the used silicon real estate worthwhile performance wise.
Next year's Haswell architecture may or may not prove your point. Next year, Intel is giving their integrated GPU its own memory to speed things up. If they do it right, it'll perform like a GT 650M, and nobody will ask for a separate GPU... if they do it wrong, then you will have made next year's great argument one year too early :)
The usual Ultrabook recipe we see is an Ivy Bridge ULV processor, 4GB RAM (often non-upgradeable), and a mystery SSD at 128 or 256 GB. A few connectors and then anything between a crappy, dark screen or a really nice IPS screen.
I found only one Ultrabook with a concept that really differs from this. Gigabyte's U2442V and U2442N. They sport an SSD AND a conventional hard drive. (not talking about a hybrid here, its really 2 drives). And if you find the ULV processor too weak for your taste, you can go to the U2442N and get a regular Ivy Bridge quad core processor and a Kepler based Nvidia GT 640M GPU to go with it. This isn't quite as thin as Asus' MacBook Air alike Zenbooks, but it hardly weights anymore (1.4 KG vs 1.6 KG). The screen is 1600x900, though its only a TN screen and not quite bright enough for outdoor use.
Personally, I don't care in which direction size and weight gets reduced. "Thin" isn't the hot feature for me, if they shave off size and weight in other directions, I'm quite happy with that. Like making less wide display bezels.
4 Gb is actually 32bit boundary, if Intel& Ms didn't do stupid things historically, there wouldn't be need for 64 bit OS.
A person buying something other than tablet in this age is clearly looking for power and all he/ she gets is 4gb with a joke like gpu which may be less powerful and less supported (known, big deal) than a tablet gpu.
If the the 4 gb issue didn't exist,I was looking for a portable real computer which I would likely go with gentoo or Debian.
Soon, companies will go crazy with photo resolutions, screen resolution to push people upgrading their working devices and nothing with 4gb RAM will happily handle it.
Ultrabooks don't sell because they are a poor choice for most people unless all you want is bling. I don't see more than 4 GB. RAM being an issue for most folks these days as consumers tend to replace laptops every few years because they are so slow compared to a desktop. 4 GB. of RAM is sufficient for most desktop and laptop users though there are exceptions. If your use requires or benefits from more RAM then buy a laptop with that option. Objective testing shows only minute gains for most apps when going from 4 GB. to 8GB. so don't expect to really get much performance for the additional costs.
so many errors in this article... i7 3517u do have vpro and trusted execution for example.
and comparing sandy bridges to ivy brigdes doesn't make sens...
I do like a lot The Register but they should get inspired in their review by this great site :
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-3517U-Notebook-Processor.74462.0.html
I do have a UX32VD, great machine, fast, wonderful screen (1900x1028, non glare), big hdd, small sdd (perfect to install linux on it and having a very very fast boot).
FYI - I have had to correct the mis-information at "notebookcheck" on numerous occasions though The Reg seems to get technical things wrong a lot. Ivy Bridge is not a tangible performance improvement other than in battery life. Anything less than HD 4000 is stone age. Intel has a LOT of work to do in the "portable" segment to become competitive with AMD for mainstream laptop consumers.
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