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Ultrabooks were one of the most discussed form factors at this year’s CES 2012. This was due not only to Intel‘s CES marketing push, but by all of Intel’s ecosystem demonstrating their prowess by showing their latest and greatest designs. OEMs like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Lenovo showed their new designs with different industrial design, color, keyboards, displays, Intel processors, storage, and proprietary software and cloud services. One question I have received often since CES is, “who loses if Ultrabooks are successful”? We must first start by defining an Ultrabook then move on to a complex discussion with many scenarios.
Ultrabooks were introduced by Intel at last year’s Computex 2011. Intel owns the Ultrabook trademark, which means only those who license it and abide by its restrictions can use it. This becomes important as it relates to receiving Intel marketing and design funds. If OEMs, ODMs and retailers don’t abide by the Ultrabook definition, they will not be eligible for those funds.
Most of today’s notebooks use spinning storage, specifically a 2.5″ hard drive. On the spot market, you can buy a 1 TB 2.5″ hard drive for $145-110. This is very inexpensive and enough storage to hold just about everything a user may need unless they’re a videophile. The downside is that physical hard drives are slower and consume more power than SSDs. To achieve the battery like Toshiba PA3400U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3420U-1BAC Battery , Toshiba PA3420U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3420U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3421U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3450U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3451U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3457U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3465U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3475U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3476U-1BRS Battery , Toshiba PA3478U-1BRS Battery life and more importantly start up requirements, Ultrabooks require some form of SSD. SSDs can come in the form of an SSD drive or a hybrid drive which has a combined SSD and physical hard drive. A 128GB SSD drive on the spot market is around $175-200. A 500GB hybrid drive with 4GB flash costs $150 at retail.
Two different kinds of PC graphics exist, discrete and integrated. Discrete are a separate graphics chip that is either soldered on the mainboard or most likely a separate card inside the notebook. Integrated graphics are inside the SOC (System on a Chip) with the CPU and memory controller or it exists in what’s called the “tunnel” or the companion chip to a CPU. Intel provides integrated graphics only and is the PC graphics market share leader pulled by their CPU franchise. AMD provides discrete cards and chips, formerly branded ATI, and also provides integrated solutions with their Fusion-based SOCs. Nvidia serves the PC graphics market solely with discrete graphics cards and chips.
The potential losers here are discrete graphics. It’s not they are “banned”, but the Ultrabook specifications make it very challenging to integrate discrete graphics into designs. The two challenges are height and power draw. Adding a discrete card and keeping inside the 21mm restriction is difficult but not impossible. Two major players, Lenovo and Samsung have already announced Ultrabooks with discrete graphics. The announced Samsung Series 5 contains the AMD HD 7550M and the Lenovo ThinkPad T430u will ship with Nvidia Geforce 610M.
Discrete graphics from AMD and Nvidia will again get challenged when Intel unveils Ivy Bridge that has Intel HD 4000 graphics that support Direct X (DX) 11. AMD and Nvidia have managed to weather the risk through Intel’s DX 9 and DX 10 and I expect a similar kind of battle here. The ending could be different if AMD and Nvidia cannot effectively market the value of more gaming graphics or GPU-compute horsepower.