Rocket Books Claire Benoist
Last October, Acer and Asus debuted the first ultrabooks, a class of laptops characterized by their sub-inch-thick chassis. The trim designs, however, left engineers little room to include graphics cards or large, fast processors.
Toshiba Satellite U845 (image top): Although its one-inch frame is thicker than those of most ultrabooks, the 14-inch Satellite U845 has more ports than its competitors, including full-size HDMI and Ethernet plugs. From $749
Acer Aspire S5:At 0.59 of an inch thick, the Aspire S5 is the thinnest ultrabook available. To save space in the chassis, Acer designers fused the 13.3-inch laptop's boot drive directly onto the motherboard. $1,000
Fujitsu Lifebook U772: The U772 is the first ultrabook to dock with an entire full-size office setup-monitor, keyboard, mouse-using a single plug. Fujitsu engineers placed a 1.2-inch docking connector on the bottom of the 14-inch laptop. $1,200
THE TREND
The new third-generation Intel Core chips, code-named Ivy Bridge, on the other hand, are both compact and powerful-and will run 110 ultrabooks by year's end. To increase speed and efficiency without increasing size, Intel engineers redesigned the transistors on the chip. A typical transistor has a single gate that sits flat on the silicone substrate and regulates the flow of electrons. The Ivy Bridge transistor has three gates arranged around a vertical fin. Building tall gates saved 10 nanometers in width, enabling the engineers to cram 1.4 billion transistors into a 0.25-square-inch chip, 300 million more than on the previous generation.THE BENEFIT
More gates means more bits can be processed, so the chip can execute more operations simultaneously. As a result, an Ivy Bridge processor runs nearly 20 percent faster than previous chips while consuming less power. Even tasks such as playing high-def video or the latest version of Civilization won't affect an ultrabook's speed or cause battery life to dip much below eight hours.Toshiba Satellite U845 (image top): Although its one-inch frame is thicker than those of most ultrabooks, the 14-inch Satellite U845 has more ports than its competitors, including full-size HDMI and Ethernet plugs. From $749
Acer Aspire S5:At 0.59 of an inch thick, the Aspire S5 is the thinnest ultrabook available. To save space in the chassis, Acer designers fused the 13.3-inch laptop's boot drive directly onto the motherboard. $1,000
Fujitsu Lifebook U772: The U772 is the first ultrabook to dock with an entire full-size office setup-monitor, keyboard, mouse-using a single plug. Fujitsu engineers placed a 1.2-inch docking connector on the bottom of the 14-inch laptop. $1,200
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