Well, this is my experience with an ivy ultrabook.
Aspire S3, with the i5 3317U.
Exact same ports as the reference, average trackpad. Slightly annoying keyboard.
Ran Sandra on it. Most scores were higher than Dell's XPS13 with an equivalent SB proc, except memory bandwidth due to a single-channel RAM stick, 4GB DDR3-1600 at 11-11-11-28.
The Acer has a 500GB HDD with a 20GB SSD as a cache.
Here are the problems i saw:
1. Trackpad. Miles away from Apple's stuff; same goes for the gesture support.
2. Annoying keyboard. Good layout, but annoying.
3. Heat, damn it. I measured the CPU peaking at 76*C at high GPU and CPU load. Vent's at the back, thankfully, unlike the XPS 13. Still gets too hot over long periods.
4. If the GPU is under load, heat spreads to the CPU too, and vice versa. obvious consequence of ptting both together.
5. Couldn't run graphics or GPGPU benchmarks on Sandra. Apparently OpenCL driver support is missing on HD4000.
6. Can't finish an 8GB HD video conversion (arcsoft, quick sync, general H.246, SimHD) on the battery.
7. Took 20 mins more than the 1.6GHz SB CPU in the XPS 13 to finish the above stated transcode.
8. Couldn't play Halo CE at 1366x768 on high without severe stuttering and wildly swinging frame rates. they would swing from 40 to 100 fps continuously in an empty room.
9. The GPU was pegged at 350MHz irrespective of load. Only saw it spike for a tiny (VERY TINY) interval to 1050 MHz. The Dell went there more frequently, there was just something odd here. Had latest drivers, will recheck soon.
10. Glossy screen
11. Average battery life. 5 hours i guess. Didn't time but never felt like an awful lot.
12. BLOATWARE. 80+ processes on startup! WTF! McAfee is SOOOOO bloated! heck even interferes with benchmarks.
But the transcode mentioned took only 1hr 10 mins which is great considering that a Core 2 Quad Q8400 and a 9600GT took 5 hours to do the same.
Andrew, i don't know if you saw any of these flaws in your ref model, but i truly believe these things (keyboard, screen, trackpad, and other "experience" factors) should be given more emphasis than raw benchmarks. After all, when you buy a laptop in this price bracket, you either get performance or luxury. Clearly, ultrabooks don't fall into the performance category. If you don't get luxury either, isn't it a failing on Intel (or its partners') part?
Looking to review the new Vaio ultrabooks too (T model an E14 A, i think)!
Cheers!
p.s. Why can't anyone except apple use a decent trackpad? Can't understand.
EDIT:
There was an updated driver, ends with 8.15.??.2761. Intel's driver update util couldn't id that an updated version was available. Anyway, did a manual install. Halo much more steady now, it's finally hitting 1050 MHz, but then after a period starts jumping b/w that and 350 MHz. GPU usage did hit 100%, spent most of its time above 60%. fps was usually around 70 in an empty room, gunfights make it drop to 40, explosions brought it down to the teens for a moment.
No QuickSync improvement, still no openCL support. QuickSync activity doesn't seem to trigger the GPU's higher clock, so it sits on 350 MHz.
EDIT 2: Apparently OpenCL 1.1 should be supported, but it doesn't work with sandra. Unless TH does some more digging, i'm not sure i'll get an answer.
) but when they designed IVY they should have designed every chip with the HD 4000. The HD 4000 is still outperformed by Liano iGPU if you remember...
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