Progress on Ultrabook Vision

Published:2011/9/15 1:47:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

Ultrabook, a thin and light system that is believed to represent the future for notebooks and tablets, is supposed to move greatly as Intel showed stepwise progress rallying the industry around this concept. This advance comes after a mania for tablets driven by Apple’s ARM-based iPad and the first details about Windows 8 for ARM processors.

During the Intel Developer Forum, four Taiwan ODMs showed prototype ultrabooks using Intel’s 22nm Ivy Bridge chips. The CPUs are the first described and are now available in engineering samples with production slated for early next year. Acer, Asustek, Samsung and Toshiba already ship ultrabooks based on the current Sandy Bridge CPUs.

The first working version of Haswell, a 22nm follow on to Ivy Bridge that aims to slash power consumption while maintaining performance is also introduced. Haswell is designed to deliver a 20-fold power reduction to enable a mobile system to live ten days in standby mode on a single charge. It is believed that the Haswell will complete the ultrabook revolution.

The batteries for Ultrabooks are prismatic ones using lithium ion polymer, new chassis materials and flash or ultra thin drives. In August, 2011, Intel hosted conferences in China and Taiwan attended by more than 1,300 people to rally supply chain partners around the details of the vision. Intel is driving new power management initiatives among other component makers in order to achieve the ultrabook power targets.

Intel has developed an LCD panel specification that saves system power by storing enough data to serve up a screen image without waking up the host CPU. The spec involves transitioning the panel interface from LVDS to embedded Displayport and putting less than a megabyte of memory in the panel electronics. The scheme could add up to an hour to the average life of a mobile system’s battery, Intel estimates.

Separately, Intel described a broad, emerging PC power management scheme called Converged Platform Power Management that will first be enabled under Windows 8. The approach involves aggressively scheduling power use across the system based on power parameters that components report to the system. How broadly component makers are buying into Intel’s power management initiatives is unclear.

Two Taiwan system makers, Asustek and Acer, have committed to shipping systems next year that use Thunderbolt, Intel’s latest high-speed I/O technology. To date only Apple and a handful of peripheral makers have shipped systems based on the link announced early this year.

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