Mooley Eden was on stage at IDF this morning to deliver 1hr of Ultrabook presentation. Add the coverage that Ultrabooks got in the first keynote and you’re looking at about 40% of the total keynote stage time being dedicated to Ultrabooks. It’s clear where Intels marketing dollars will be going next year.
Mooley set the scene by talking about PC market growth saying that China had overtaken the US market as #1. “Emerging markets are on fire” he adds. In a market full of tablet and smartphone competition, he needed to do that.
In the new PC, the C will stand for Creativity…
Intel 2nd Generation Core processors (Sandy Bridge) were presented as the perfect ‘balanced’ platform to provide for that creativity requirement with Ivy Bridge following up as the ‘Tic +’ development to the current architechture. Tic+ means that instead of running their current platform through a process shrink they will add new features.
New for Ivy Bridge will be ‘Power aware interrupt routing’ and a redesigned graphics core with DX11 support. We’ll see worthwhile advantages in the next platform which always begs the question. ‘should we wait.’
Redesigned graphics includes Dx11 support
Moving on to what people want, we heard about left-brain, right-brain requirements summarised in to 6 solutions.
Left: mobility without compromise, peace of mind. Good price; Right: power to create, design that reflects me, immerse and responsive experience. Ultrabooks are designed to give these solutions to the user.
In defining some of the unique features of the Ultrabook Mooley Eden covered Rapid Start, Smart Connect, Identity Theft Protection and Anti-Theft which got a demo on stage. McAfee are obviously behind this hybrid hardware / software solution.
And then we heard about Windows 8. We saw the Acer Aspire S3 running Windows 8 using the keyboard to control the Metro user interface and confirmation that standard Windows apps will run in the traditional user interface.
Highlighting more power-saving features and part of a call-to-arms to reduce power drain all-round we saw LG Display demonstrate panel self-refresh which can save up to 500mW. Every little counts! Thunderbolt was highlighted with an announcement that Acer will deliver Thunderbolt connectivity in 2012.
Finally we got to Haswell, the 2013 generation of the Core platform, saw a working demo of a PC running Haswell and were left with the thought that Haswell will “Complete the Ultrabook Revolution.”
In summary we havent heard anything that we didn’t know already and no major adjustments are needed to the Ultrabook Features List. We’re still left with a big unanswered question. There are a big pot of features that Ultrabook makers can pick and choose from when they make their Ultrabooks but which of those features can you guarantee will be in an Ultrabook? For that answer we went to Adam King, the Director of Notebook Marketing and we’ll be writing that up in a follow-up article.
The big take-away from today? Intel just spent 40% of their stage time talking about Ultrabooks.
