As part of our continuing co-op with Intel on highlighting interesting and useful resources from our favorite Ultrabook-related company (!) we’ve got a 3rd party report for you that highlights the responsiveness and performance characteristics of an Ultrabook compared to previous generation laptops.
Principled Technologies have taken the Touch Ultrabook we had as judges and teams in the UCUC and highlighted some real-world advantages in their analysis. The report shows methodology and testing results for a range of features.
Boot-time, hibernate time, launching apps, 3DMark, PCMark, battery life, Javascript and HDD encryption were tested and compared with a (2010) 1st-gen Core-based laptop. Customers upgrading to an Ultrabook are likely to have a laptop older than this test device.
One of the key features, and one that summarizes the Ultrabook nicely for the ‘layperson’ is responsiveness. Application start times are central to this and there’s a nice graph in the report showing some comparisons.
I can add to that list. Cyberlink PowerDirector can take 20 seconds to start on a pure HDD laptop. On some of the faster, SSD-only Ultrabooks I’ve tested it starts in 5 seconds.
Turbo Boost is another key feature. We see it helping boost a lot of our CPU-bound tests but it helps in other ways too. Unzipping a file and short-term CPU boost for web page viewing are two examples. Hard drive encryption is another and the report highlights a 60% improvement in a full hard-disk encryption activity. That’s minutes, many minutes saved!
One element I would have like to see covered in a bit more detail is video creation. The encode/decode hardware on Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks means you’ve got an incredibly speedy way to convert videos for portable players and a huge improvement, especially with SSD, in the experience with video editing tools. It’s something I’ve been testing for years so trust me, Intel Quick Sync on the latest Core CPUS with a good SSD is 1080p capable! [Intel has an article about my video editing experience here.]
The PDF is worth having as a reference if you work in the laptop industry or if you’re looking to buy and Ultrabook. Download it here.
This is a sponsored post brought to you by Intel and Ultrabooknews. All content written by Ultrabooknews. Subject and source article by Intel. We thank Intel for their support of Ultrabooknews
