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Intel pushes Ultrabooks for Xmas

But admits better ones coming in the new year

IDF 2011 Intel may be keen for World+Dog to buy an Ultrabook this Christmas - it's "working with industry partners to deliver mainstream-priced products beginning this holiday season" - but smart buyers may choose to wait until 2012.

The chip giant will show off Ultrabooks based on its upcoming 22nm 'Ivy Bridge' CPU "early next year", very possibly at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.

Ivy Bridge will be based on Intel's "3D" tri-gate transistor design.

Vendors may choose to wait too. Most of the Ultrabooks being shown off at Intel Developer Forum this week were the same set that was unveiled at the IFA consumer electronics show earlier this month.

So, that's kit from Toshiba, Lenovo, Acer and Asus. There were also sample Ultrabooks from Foxconn and Inventec, but these companies are contract manufacturers, not well known laptop sellers. None of them were quite as impressively svelte as the Acer and Asus offerings.

Intel is hoping Ultrabooks will get tablet-keen consumers buying laptops again, and it was clear from CEO Paul Otellini's IDF keynote that while Intel is certainly happy to sell chips for tablets, it would really rather you adopted an Ultrabook as your "ultimate personal companion" rather than a fondleslab.

Ultraboks will deliver "the most satisfying and most complete computing experience", he said, stressing their performance and sheer portability as laptops you can carry around as easily as you might a tablet.

Come 2013, Ultrabooks will get a new CPU still, codenamed 'Haswell', that will allow them to go into stand-by mode yet stay connected for as long as ten days, though the caveat there is that it will require "industry collaboration" - better battery tech and improved power management in the operating system, in other words. ®

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