14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Developer Forum (IDF), currently taking place in San Francisco, California, has brought about some interesting revelations regarding the upcoming range of ultrabooks.
After the deliberately vague data on the Haswell CPUs themselves, as well as the Clover Trail Atom line, we are glad to see some specifics on a certain product range that the CPUs will reside in.
We are, naturally, speaking of ultrabooks, those ultrathin laptops that Intel has been trying to use as a sort of anti-tablet buffer, albeit without a sufficient amount of success.
We are fairly sure that slates have already established themselves as a product that consumers like enough to see as independent from the PC segment. Still, since many people will have to choose between one and a laptop, for financial reasons if nothing else, Intel hopes to rekindle interest in the latter.
Ultrabooks powered by Haswell CPUs, priced at $699 / 543-699 Euro, will reportedly be capable of running for up to nine hours on a single battery charge.
What's more, they will have low-capacity NAND solid-state drives, no doubt for the Smart Response Technology (SSD caching), assuming the main storage drive isn't an SSD itself.
Furthermore, multi-gesture touchpads, Wi-Fi, Wireless Display support (WiDi) and 720p HD video chat will be default assets.
Not only that, but the Santa Clara, California-based company means to install Anti Malware protection software, as well as identity protection technology, on the ultrabooks, alongside the Windows 8 operating system.
As for everything else, OEMs would have to ship ultrabooks with 4 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, 13-inch displays of 1366 x 768 or 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution and 32 GB SSD + 320 GB HDD for storage (or just a 128 GB SSD).
Shipments will, of course, only begin in 2013, as Haswell is not going to be released until then. PCMark vantage should return a score of 16,000 when run on them, and 80 MB/s in the PC Mark Vantage Video test.