Feature Articles

All about Ultrabooks

By Leo Boon Yeow - 26 Nov 2011

What Can You Do with Ultrabooks?

What Can You Do with Ultrabooks?

So the tech industry is abuzz with chatter about Ultrabooks, but what can you expect to do with this new class of notebooks? Is there a 'catch-22' associated with an Ultrabook? Let's recollect where it stands. Here you have notebooks that are extremely portable, thin and come with screens that are generally 13 inches across. They have tablet-like features, such as instant resume, could potentially be touch enabled and depending on Windows 8, it could be pen controlled, or better yet, both.

In fact, much of what an Ultrabook can do, is very much dependent on the upcoming Windows operating system codenamed, Windows 8. This new OS is supposed to be more tablet friendly, but at the same time, maintaining its PC centric roots. Effectively, this means it will offer two types of computing experiences on the same OS. But if your Ultratbook machine shipped this year, in 2011, it will still be based on Windows 7.

So what exactly can you do with an Ultrabook, running on Windows 7? Well the answer could simply be, anything you can do on Windows 7, but that’s not quite right. Let’s look at the components an Ultrabook comes with, and let us break it down for you.

Ultrabooks can generally run Windows 7 just fine, Their reasonable Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics is able to render almost anything you need to - except for serious gaming. That limitation is more than understandable though.

In terms of graphical power, Ultrabooks run on the fairly versatile integrated graphics (Intel HD 3000). Rendering the Windows 7 desktop isn’t a problem, and the same goes for spreadsheets and charts on your typical office software. Running a few tabs in your web browser, filled with rich HTML5, or even Flash apps won’t pose problems (unlike graphic intensive games). Even maintream photo and video editing programs would be a pleasure to use. If you stretch it a bit, depending on each system's configuration, professional grade application can run reasonably well too.

With start-up times that need to be 20 seconds or less (a guideline laid by Intel), without tweaking any software or hardware, this would most Ultrabooks will likely be running off solid state drives. When you have an SSD onboard, the extremely efficient read/write speeds and fast seek times of these devices will also contribute to more efficient loading of programs, and everything else. The more affordable models would still be using a traditional hard drive, so don't assume that an SSD is the norm.

So essentially, an Ultrabook can do just about anything but intensive games - until unless the next revision of Ultrabooks come along in the future where their thin profile and limited TDP range can accommodate a future generation of discrete graphics.

If an Ultrabook can accomplish just about anything, how does it differ from beefier multimedia and gaming grade machines? Simply put, computing hardware has evolved a lot faster than software can catch up with, leading to the current situation where even entry-level notebooks are sufficient for most needs. Where the more beefier machines deliver their edge is when you crunch very large workloads in rendering or engineering software, run several content creation tasks in parallel or indulge in high quality gaming. The Ultrabook wasn't designed to tackle these extreme situations and hence the presence of various notebook segmentation to cater to every need.

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