IDF 2011 Eden Keynote: Ultrabooks and Ivy Bridge

Eden then began talking about what it takes to make Ultrabooks so thin. He showed off a number of Ultrabooks from various OEMs. He then brought out a rep from Microsoft to talk about some advances in Windows 8 that would leverage some of the capabilities of Ultrabooks. A tablet running Windows 8 was briefly shown and then they moved on to a demo which showed an Ultrabook waking from sleep in less than 2 seconds. Mooly slid on over to another array of Ultrabooks on stage and disclosed that all of the machines were based on Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge architecture.

  

  
Thin is still in with Ultrabooks galore and tablets.

Next came another demo of a new display technology from IDT, dubbed "Panel Self Refresh," that’s designed to conserve power. With current notebooks, the screens consume a relatively large amount of power, because they’re constantly being refreshed which requires the CPU and GPU to come out of sleep states, even when a static, unchanging image is being displayed. Screens featuring Panel Self Refresh technology, however, use electronics within the screens themselves to store and display static images, allowing the CPU and GPU to remain in a sleep state longer. It was reported, that the technology can save upwards of 500mW of power, which would translate to about 45 minutes to 1 hour of adde battery life in an Ultrabook. To show how the technology really worked, the presenter even pulled the monitor cable from the system, at which point the static image remained on the screen. PDR technology is still in the development phase, but Eden hopes it’ll be the industry standard within two years.

  

  
Panel Self Refresh Technology and Thunderbolt IO, not just for Mac anymore

Mr. Eden then went on to explain that Thunderbolt technology would be coming to Ultrabooks and showed a demo of four, uncompressed HD video streams running from a Thunderbolt-connected Intel Solid State Storage array that could stream data at over 700MB/s.

  

  

  
Intel's Haswell processor, in the flesh.

Mooly then concluded his talk with by mentioning Intel’s future Haswell architecture, slated for release in 2013. Pulling a Haswell chip out of his pocket, he revealed that one of the demo systems on stage was based on Haswell and that Intel already had working samples in the lab. This was the first time Intel had showed Haswell hardware in action.