In a launch event full of superlatives, tech giant Intel formally unveiled on Thursday, July 11, its 4th generation Core processors, which the company said will “reinvent” the computing industry all over again.
With a full-house crowd at the Makati Shangri-la Hotel, company executives led Intel Philippines Calum Chrisholm and Intel Asia Pacific product marketing director Leighton Philips dubbed the launch of the new microprocessors as a watershed event similar to the introduction of the Pentium and Centrino chips.
“This is a milestone,” gushed Philips, who also launched the ultrabook model in the country a couple of years back. “This is one of those products that will change the industry.”
The Intel official said the 4th generation Core processors incorporate the first system-on-a-chip for PCs, enabling new form factors and 2-in-1 designs such as notebooks that transforms into tablets.
The US semicon firm also divulged that the new processors enable 50 percent improvement in battery life, allowing standby time of up to 10 to 13 days.
The chipmaker also pointed out that the on-board Intel Iris graphics double the graphics performance over the previous generation.
“It’s the first chip that we built with the ultrabook in mind,” proclaimed Philips, saying all devices — 2-in-1s ultrabooks, portable all-in-ones, and traditional laptops and desktops — that will come out with the new chips starting August will have touch-screens.
He said an entry-level ultrabook powered by a 4th generation Core will be priced at about P39,000. As early as now, however, PC vendor Acer said they now have ultrabooks that run on the latest Intel chips.
New mobile business products with 4th generation Intel Core vPro will be available later this year, the company also said.
Saying it is Intel’s largest generation-over-generation gain in battery life enablement in company history, the new processors can bring an 50 percent improvement in battery life over the previous generation in active workloads when watching movies or surfing the Internet, and two to three times improvement in standby battery life.
“For some systems coming to market this year, over 9 hours of active use battery life or 10 to 13 days of standby with fresh data on a single charge is expected,” Intel said.
To achieve this breakthrough, Intel said it exceeded its expectations on power reduction at the CPU level to as low as 6 watts and also worked across the system for power optimization.
