Ivy Bridge - First impressions
Intel announced its new Ivy Bridge processor line yesterday. We're busy testing new Ivy Bridge -based Ultrabooks but in the meantime here are our first impressions.
Based on our preliminary handling of laptops powered by Intel's new Ivy Bridge machines, here are our immediate reactions. These will be followed shortly by fully benchmarked tests.
1. Ivy Bridge has improved graphics
The graphics processing units on Ivy Bridge processors now come with up to 16 execution units (compared with up to 12 on Sandy Bridge), which means the processors can now hand off more graphics processing to the GPU while doing other things. In the video below, you get a sense of this, although these are not benchmark tests, since we are doing these in our labs now.
2. Better performance for the battery life
Right now we're taking Intel's word for it, but are testing Ivy Bridge battery performance in our Labs today; we will come back to you with some battery benchmark test results by tonight.
3. Quicker resume from hybernation
All Ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge now go from the (S4) deep sleep state (S4) to full keyboard activity in less than 7 seconds.
4. Better security
Ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge processors now have a technology called Intel Identify Protection, which uses chip-level authentication similar to hardware tokens, to protect users during online shopping, banking and so on. This joins Intel Anti-Theft (Intel AT) technology, an aftermarket service introduced earlier in Ultrabooks that combines an on-chip hardware-based technology with a third party services from providers such as McAfee to let you lock down a notebook if it's stolen.
Plus... Enteprise features now available on Ultrabooks
Some Ultrabook Ivy Bridge processors now come with vPro technology, which embeds a suite of enterprise oriented services based around manageability and security on the processors itself. Fujitsu is the first vendor to release vPro -enabled Ultrabooks.