If you’ve got an Ultrabook, it likely has either integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics or discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics. Recently we gave you 6 excellent game suggestions for your Ultrabook. Now we’ve got a suggestion to make sure your Ultrabook is running those games as well as possible. One of the best ways to keep the graphical capabilities of your Ultrabook performing at maximum capacity is to ensure that you’re using the latest driver for your graphics card. Intel and Nvidia regularly update their GPU drivers to address bugs and other problems. Sometimes there are game-specific fixes, and other times there are general performance-enhancing changes. In this article I’ll show you how to quickly and easily update your Ultrabook’s GPU drivers in order to maintain maximum graphics performance.  Note that this guide will also apply to Intel HD4000 graphics when Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks are released later this year.

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In 2012 we’ll see the next generation of Ultrabooks featuring the Ivy Bridge platform and integrated HD4000 graphics. Existing Ultrabooks utilize HD3000 graphics which aren’t adequate for recently released blockbuster games (see the ‘Gaming’ section of our Samsung Series 5 review). HD4000 graphics are going to be very welcomed as part of the next generation of Ultrabooks for both gaming and video encoding/decoding purposes. A benchmark from Intel comparing HD2000 and HD4000 graphics gives us an idea of how HD4000 will perform, even if we don’t have a direct comparison to HD3000 yet (note that the benchmark compares desktop processors, but the changes in performance from HD3000 to HD4000 are relevant).

At IDF Beijing 2012, Intel has a demo showing the Ivy Bridge / HD4000 platform running three taxing tasks across three separate monitors simultaneously. You’ll see video encoding, gaming (Portal 2), and HD video playback all at the same time. Quite impressively, the computer handles it with relative ease. NetbookNews shot a video of the demo in action:

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Intel have just published a video showing the differences between hard drives and (Intel) solid state drives. It’s actually an advert for the latest Intel SSDs and there’s a bit of humor in here, a lot of tight editing and a possible shot in the foot for Ultrabook hybrid hard drives which, under most of these test scenarios, would be just as slow as the standard hard drives. 

“The speed you need at the price you want.” says the advert.

The reason I ‘m highlighting this video though is because I know a lot of it is true. I’ve done exactly the same tests myself with the same software used in the video and there’s a huge difference. Joking aside, Intel didn’t need to dramatize and editize (!) this video. I could show you exactly the same effect between the Acer S3 and the Toshiba Z830 and the Toshiba is not even carrying a class-leading SSD. Watch the video below though because it’s an easy one to forward to your friends as an explanation.

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It has been suggested that one of Intel’s objectives for the Ultrabook program was to move the conversation away from netbooks, where the bottom line was price — which came complete with low profit margins. And who could blame them for wanting this? Sales of Apple’s premium-priced MacBook line were strong as ever while the PC laptop market was seeing a veritable explosion of small, inexpensive machines that were marketed for their low price more than their features or quality.

I must say, it seems to be working. Have a look at this graph of searches comparing ‘ultrabook’ (blue) and ‘netbook’ (red) Google web search queries in the last 12 months:

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Back at IDF September, Intel and Google finally announced that they’d be working together to get Android up and running on x86 devices. While there were a number of Android-running x86 tablets and a smartphone prototype or two floating around IDF, it wasn’t immediately apparent what the major advantage of Android 0n x86 devices would be for your everyday consumer. In fact, it wasn’t even apparent exactly why any of the existing Android manufactures would  want to create x86 Android devices, given that up until now, pretty much all of their R&D has been focused on ARM devices. However, Intel may actually be perfectly positioned to be able to stimulate the growth of an upcoming segment of Android device — one which truly converges mobile and desktop functionality into one device. Chippy has coined such hybrid functionality: ‘High Dynamic Range Computing’ (HDRC), and the time might just be right for Intel to ignite this segment and find their own place in the Android market.

Before moving on, you might want to visit this link to see Chippy’s look at HDRC from last year.

Any consumer-available Android device that you can get your hands on today uses ARM architecture which is fundamentally incompatible with the x86 architecture that Intel products are based on. Android was originally built to run exclusively on ARM (though being open-source, some community projects were able to do some porting to x86). It wasn’t until several years after Android was on the scene that Intel and Google finally got together to work on full hardware-level Android on x86 support. That work is still ongoing. We’ve had our hands on Android devices running with Intel’s x86 architecture, but it is clear that there is still much optimization to be done. Once everything is complete though, won’t a device running Android on ARM be, for the user, indistinguishable from a device running Android on Intel’s x86?

If ARM has battery life, Intel has power. It’s an interesting dichotomy — we’ve watched as ARM-based devices have continuously scaled up to meet performance demands as the Android device market has grown. Intel has the opposite problem; they’ve got power, but have been constantly trying to scale it down to work with mobile at the tablet/smartphone level. Intel’s Atom series is a notable effort in the last several years to scale things back far enough that users could get reasonable performance and reasonable battery life out of a netbook. Once Intel can achieve the same thing at the smartphone and tablet level (and they’ve been working on this for years), they’ve got the expertise to push the processing end of things far beyond what we currently see from ARM — not to mention that the same x86 architecture that will be found in Intel-based phones and tablets is capable of booting full-fledged desktop operating systems.

If Intel plays their cards right, they could do very well in the Android market by stimulating the HDRC segment. HDRC isn’t really a mainstream thing at this point — most people have their desktop computer and they’ve got a smartphone and maybe a tablet. They view these two devices as fundamentally different. The promise of HDRC is creating a device that scales so well that it can converge these two categories of devices, which are viewed as different, into a single unit. This is a serious challenge because essentially it asks for a single device that is instant-on and has phone-like (all day) battery life, but, when plugged in, can be as powerful as one would expect from a laptop or desktop. Intel has the expertise for the high-end of the HDRC spectrum, we see this daily from the desktop computers that we work on. If they can combine this with phone/tablet-like low-power functionality, they could blow ARM out of the water and define the HDRC space that mobile technology has been steadily moving toward for the last 5 years.

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Intel didn’t hold back on pulling together an Ultrabook stage show at CeBIT this week. In a pre-opening walk-about we found a hall area packed with every Ultrabook that’s available in Europe right now.

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At a Intel press event, still going on as I write, Intel has just announced that Z2580 that we tipped earlier today. It’s a dual-core version of the current Intel smartphone platform which is capable of running Android x86 and other x86 software.

…the  Atomâ„¢ Z2580 processor that doubles the performance of the Atom processor Z2460, and features an advanced multimode LTE/3G/2G solution. Intel will sample the Z2580 in the second half of the year with customer products scheduled in the first half of 2013.

In addition to the Z2500 series, there’s now a new Z2000 series at 1Ghz aimed at a lower-cost segment.

Addressing the growing handset opportunity in emerging markets where consumers look for more value at lower prices, Intel disclosed plans for the Intel® Atomâ„¢ processor Z2000.

The Z2000 is aimed squarely at the value smartphone market segment, which industry sources predict could reach up to 500 million units by 20151. The platform includes a 1.0 GHz Atom CPU offering great graphics and video performance, and the ability to access the Web and play Google Android* games. It also supports the Intel® XMM 6265 3G HSPA+ modem with Dual-SIM 2G/3G, offering flexibility on data/voice calling plans to save on costs. Intel will sample the Z2000 in mid-2012 with customer products scheduled by early 2013.

Also announced was news that Medfield will now be enabled to 2Ghz.

“Extending the leading performance and energy efficiency of the Intelâ„¢ Atom® processor Z2460, formerly codenamed “Medfield, inch Intel announced that the platform will now support speeds up to 2GHz. inch

More details if we get them in the press conference that continues…..

Very quickly before we go to the next meeting I want to relay some reliable information I’ve had this morning about Intel’s next generation phone and tablet platform.

Clover Trail (and CloverTrail +) is likely to be launched today.

The platform is Dual Core (that’s likely to be 2×1.6Ghz for Win 8 and Android Tablets) and there will be a version for smartphones.

Z2580 is the name of the platform.

More later today.