4hw.org: in recent years, the explosive growth of smart phones has made the notebook market, which has nothing to do with it, a very cold place. However, when it comes to office, it's still inseparable from it. Although the notebook market is not hot, many ultrabooks have been born in recent years, which makes consumers refreshing. For many consumers, they don't know what is ultrabook, ultrabook and ordinary What's the difference between our laptops? Let's take a look!
What is ultrabook? For most of the consumers who enter the computer market, 'ultrabook' is a quite strange term. Its popularity is far higher than 'core', 'Intel', 'Apple', 'Lenovo' and other specific brands. We interviewed several consumers at random in ZhongGuanCun market. Many of them don't know what ultrabook is, and don't know the difference between ultrabook and notebook. Even if someone has heard the name "ultrabook", they can't tell exactly where it is.
So, what is the real ultrabook? Although Intel has not given a particularly strict definition, we can summarize the four standards of ultrabook from the communication with Intel and all the models currently on the market
Standard 1: thickness less than 18 mm, weight less than 1.5 kg
At present, the 13 inch model is the most suitable for ultrabook development. Since many years ago, this size has been widely known as the "Gold Size" of notebook in the industry, because under normal use distance, the 12 inch screen looks more laborious, while the 13 inch screen is relatively comfortable; while in the mobile process, the 13 inch model is more portable than the 14 inch model. As a result, most of the ultrabooks we see today are 13 inches.
In recent years, the thickness of ordinary 13 inch notebook is between 30-35mm (the thickness of the thickest part of the body, excluding the body feet), and the weight is about 2.0-2.2kg. For a 13 inch ultrabook, you need to compress the thickness to within 18 mm and reduce the weight to within 1.5 kg. In other words, thickness and weight are reduced by about 45% and 28%, respectively.
Considering that European and American consumers prefer larger screens, 14 inch and 15.6 inch screens are also included in the ultrabook range by Intel, and the standard is slightly relaxed: the thickness is within 21mm, and the weight is within 1.8kg. These ultrabooks are also significantly more portable than mainstream notebooks of the same size - about 42% less in thickness and 29% less in weight.
Standard 2: wake up from sleep, less than 19 seconds
As we all know, in addition to shutting down, notebooks can also choose to sleep or sleep. Their similarities are to retain all the currently open programs, such as documents and photos being edited, and to watch half of the network video. Next, after waking up, it will be able to revert to the same desktop state as before, so that users can quickly continue their work and reduce them. Stay for time.
The difference between them is that [sleep] is to save the data in the memory, while stopping power supply to other hardware, it always keeps power supply to the memory, because once the memory is powered off, all the data in it will be lost. And [sleep] is to save the data to the hard disk. When the power is off, it is to stop power supply to all hardware, including memory and hard disk.
Due to the power consumption of memory during sleep, the standby time in sleep mode is only about 7 days, while the standby time in sleep mode is more than 30 days. However, for the traditional notebook, the reading speed of memory is much faster than that of the mechanical hard disk, so the wake-up speed of [sleep] is faster, generally only 2 to 3 seconds, while the mechanical hard disk needs 30 to 40 seconds from [sleep] to wake-up.
Ultra polar standard 3: fast start
Compared with the traditional HDD mechanical hard disk, SSD has the advantages of not afraid of falling and long life. The most important improvement is the fast reading speed. Therefore, when the notebook is equipped with SSD, the time from [sleep] to wake-up can be greatly shortened to about 10 ~ 15 seconds. This means that if a notebook is only for its own use, it can never [shut down] and choose [sleep] every time.
Since it is almost impossible for a mechanical hard disk to wake up from sleep in 19 seconds, the SSD becomes a necessary configuration for ultrabooks. The ideal ultrabook is a pure solid-state drive, which is 128 GB or 256 GB in the initial stage, and will be gradually improved in the future. However, in order to reduce the threshold of ultrabook and speed up its popularization, some manufacturers have adopted a compromise solution -- hybrid hard disk.
The so-called hybrid hard disk is to use the small capacity (16GB ~ 32GB) solid-state hard disk with the large capacity (500GB) mechanical hard disk. Some ultrabooks install the operating system in the solid-state hard disk, and hide part of the capacity of the solid-state hard disk as a special sleep partition. The other ultrabooks (such as hummingbird S3) hide all the capacity of the solid-state hard disk as Dedicated sleep partition. This ensures that the ultrabook is at least faster than the normal notebook in sleep wake-up speed, but the speed of reading and writing data in other partitions is the same as before. Of course, the hybrid hard disk also has its advantages, that is, the storage space is larger than the solid-state drive.
Standard 4: under daily working condition, the endurance is more than 5 hours
As a mobile device, battery life is a critical assessment standard for ultrabook. At present, the endurance time of ordinary notebook is usually about 3 hours, which makes many business users feel dissatisfied. Some of them often take international flights and need to work with notebook for more than 5 hours on the plane; others will spend half a day in meetings, and they don't want to take the power cord to the conference room to grab the plug.
Why does the ultrabook last longer? The reason is that its hardware power consumption is lower. First of all, it uses Intel's ultra-low voltage processor, TDP power consumption is only 17 watts, compared with the ordinary notebook's 35 watts reduced by more than half. Secondly, it is equipped with a SSD SSD with less power consumption (so in terms of endurance, the pure SSD ultrabook will perform better than the hybrid ultrabook). In addition, compared with the old laptops a few years ago, most laptops today will use lithium polymer batteries with higher density, which can provide more power per unit volume.
Long-lasting endurance
Through the disassembly of several ultrabooks, we found that more than 50% of the space on the back of the fuselage has been occupied by lithium polymer batteries, which means that the larger the volume of the ultrabook, the larger the battery capacity can also be increased, although the larger the screen will consume more power, but from the test data, the longer the endurance of the large screen ultrabook is indeed longer.
It is worth noting that the ordinary 13 inch notebook can also use lithium polymer batteries, and with its thicker body, its battery capacity is also more than the ultrabook, so it will not lose too much to the ultrabook in terms of endurance. In fact, battery technology has become a bottleneck in the whole electronic industry, including ultrabooks, tablet computers and smart phones, and a revolutionary technological breakthrough is urgently needed.
Standard 5: Intel intelligent core I series processor
Different from the previous three standards, the final standard is not for mainstream notebooks, but for Culv lightweight two years ago, which is also to prevent consumers from confusing today's ultrabook with the former Culv lightweight one. In addition to the aforementioned technical progress of hard disk and battery, the biggest improvement of ultrabook lies in the performance of processor.
On the one hand, today's core i5 series processor, even the ultra-low voltage version, also has Intel intelligent core technology, which can flexibly overclock different cores according to the system needs; while the entry-level core I3 processor also has dual core and ultra wire technology, with a total of four threads can do different things at the same time, and it still runs multiple programs Be able to maintain fluency.
Super standard 6: Intel intelligent core I series processor
On the other hand, the progress of Intel's core graphics card in the past two years can be described as a sudden leap in. Generally speaking, its game performance doubles every year on average. From the simple casual games like "running kart" to today's game, the latest core video card is enough for most ordinary users. In addition, the hardware decoder of core graphics card can play 1080p high-definition movies easily and smoothly, and can also play a role in more complex coding work, greatly reducing the waiting time of users.
The upcoming Ivy bridge ultra-low voltage processor will further improve its performance. Thanks to the application of 22 nanometer technology, the CPU power consumption in the processor is lower, but we see that its TDP power consumption is still 17 watts, which is because Intel has invested the resources saved by the CPU in the core graphics card. After our actual test, the new generation GMA HD Compared with the current GMA HD 3000, the game performance of the 4000 core graphics card has been improved by nearly 50%.