About one month ago, we put up a story about Acer’s Iconia W510—an Atom Z2760-based tablet that Intel’s engineering team contributed to. Optimizations for touch input at the operating system level, isolation of electromagnetic interference, and new algorithms to offload touch calculations to the host processor all came together in a computing experience superior to any of the other Clover Trail platforms we had tested previously.
Unfortunately, a lot of that unraveled when Alan started experiencing hardware and support issues that Acer just wasn’t able to address as smoothly as competing vendors (namely, Apple).
Nevertheless, before his Iconia W510 went in for extended repairs, Alan captured the time-lapse video on this page, showing 720p video playing back on the tablet for more than seven hours. He then attached an optional keyboard dock and played 1080p video for almost 16 hours.
Inspired by Alan’s work, Intel’s François Piednoël sent us an early peek at a prototype notebook with a Haswell-based Core i7 (that’s a Core i7, not an Atom), also time-lapsed, running for 9.5 hours using MobileMark 2012.
Now, we don’t know how large of a battery that system includes, nor do we know which CPU the test platform employs. But, given the dismal battery life of my Core i5-based Surface Pro, which leverages a 17 W Core i5, it’s becoming easier to believe that Intel’s Haswell architecture will have a profound impact on the next generation of notebooks, slates, and convertibles, even as Silvermont (Intel Silvermont Architecture: Does This Atom Change It All?) does the same in the tablet space.
Of course, all of this is a prelude to Intel’s forthcoming announcements at this year’s Computex in Taipei. We’ll have our U.S., German, and Italian teams on-site to bring you the latest each day of the show, including more information on Haswell and the form factors Intel plans to exhibit at the show. Stay tuned for more!
