Although we’ve had hints and tips that the ground-breaking Connected Standby feature is coming to the next generation of Ultrabooks it wasn’t until a recent interview that Intel really confirmed that it was coming. At Intel’s Developer Forum in Beijing in April Intel will offer a deep-dive into the feature.
I expect to see two classes of Ultrabooks come the next generation Haswell-based devices with the best-engineered devices being CS capable and the traditional designs (often the cheaper, larger, HDD-based or slightly unique designs) not having the feature.
What’s CS? It’s ‘always-on’ for Windows 8 0 just like a smartphone. What it brings in terms of battery life though is a huge, huge step forward. Witness the Clovertrail-based Windows 8 PCs that are streaming music for days, allow users to type or watch videos for 15 hours and remaining up-to-date with tweets, emails and Skype messages for many many days. Always-on is the name of the feature but it’s the mark of a huge advance in power design. In some respects, CS is the wrong branding. Advanced Power Design, would be a better way to describe it. I’m sure Intel will come up with something!
What’s Connected Standby? Read this article for more insight and some idea of battery life figures.
Connected Standby will be discussed at the Intel Developer Conference in Beijing next month and we’ll be tracking what comes out of it. Questions needs to be answered.
Session: Windows* 8 Connected Standby Innovations for Ultrabook™ Devices
Abstract:
Intended Audience: OEMs and ODMs – Motherboard Layout Designers, Power Delivery Content Experts – Memory, System Power Management Architects
In this session, we will show the technology and cost trends for High Density Interconnect (HDI) motherboards. We will show current practices with HDI and propose better ways to achieve higher motherboard area reduction with near cost parity to Type III designs. This leads to more room for battery capacity, hard drives, and other features for the form factor constrained Ultrabook™ device. We also show how we are reducing power consumption, especially using Microsoft* Windows* 8 Connected Standby feature. We will show the latest optimizations leading to significant mWatts reduction for the platforms with the 4th Generation Intel® Core™ processor, code name Haswell.
Topics include:
• Overview of Ultrabook form factor constraints
• Overview of Type III and Type IV design practices
• Improving form factor and battery capacity with HDI designs
• Overview of Microsoft Windows 8 Connected Standby Power
• A proposal for a new power delivery connected standby architecture for 2015
Note how Intel talks of Type III designs and newer Type IV which, with CS-capable components will be highly integrated. They will ultimately be cheaper to produce, smaller, lighter and tend towards fanless in some cases.
Connected Standby Ultrabooks will be in a class of their own, will bring huge improvements in battery life and will change the way you use a laptop and think about Windows 8
I really want to see what kind of standby and active battery life these systems can get.
I agreee, Intel should use a different name than what Microsoft calls it. It’s not just having internet connectivity while in standby. That’s just one feature that many probably won’t really use.
basically it must be the same as in smartphone tech know present for years. thus nothing mysterious. but not actually usable by pc generations so far because the energy drain in standby mode (sleep mode with active memory) normally is to high. in smartphones (infact in any portable phone) always on / instant on is realized via a always active device with the os and necessary applications kept in memory. if the battery is empty every device so far has to be restarted from zero. thus shortly said: every mistery made out of this functions for pcs is marketing fizz fuzz. nothing else.
What exactly is your point? Having smartphone like active standby and running battery life on PCs is a big deal.
From what I can understand from your comment, it’s like saying a truck having 70+ MPG or 30+ km/l is just marketing since there are motorcycles that already get that.