Stefan Mileschin

Intel's new line of Haswell Ultrabooks which will not see the light of day until 2013, will ship with added features on the basic model in response to a savaging from the tech press this year.

According to documents seen by TechEye, there is a serious difference in price and performance between the standard products and the top samples, .

For standard models, the baseline Bill of Materials must not exceed $699. Intel is insisting these machines must include: all day battery life at nine hours, voice command, HD video chat with a 720p resolution camera, as well as a wireless display, robust wi-fi, bundled anti virus protection in the consumer model, and a multi touchpad.

There will be a minimum capacity of 16GB NAND for While Using functions, and it sohuld be a storage product that can get a PCMark Vantage HDD Sub Score of more than 16000 and a PCMark Vantage video editing score of more than 80MB/s. Intel recommends an SSD.

For security, Intel is enabling anti-theft in the platform BIOS and it will be opt-out. There will also be identity protection technology bundled into the OS. Intel recommends that the Shark Bay line ships with its own McAfee security bundle, though concedes that Windows defender for Windows 8 does meet the antivirus and antimalware requirements of Shark Bay for OEMs.

The recommended sample OEM configurations for a 13 inch Ultrabook in 2013 on connected standby are a <18mm clamshell/<20mm hybrid metal chassis weighing in under 3 lb. The CPU should be an HSW 2+3, while memory is 2x2GB x32LPDDR3 (1600), and a 128 GB SSD for storage. There is a 1080p USB camera and a 13" display with 1920x1080 resolution.

The machine ships with WWAN, as well as multi-touch screen and multi-touch touchpad, and will have NFC capabilities. The battery life will be 9+ hours and media playback battery life will be 6+ hours. The recommended spec ships with Windows 8 Connected Standby.

Baseline samples ship without Windows 8 Connected Standby. They will not require touch interfaces or ship with WWAN, or ship with NFC capabilities. Baseline display resolution is 1366x768. The chassis will be plastic and will weigh in at 3 lb +. Baseline memory is 2x2 GB x 16 DDR3L (1600), storage is 320GB HDD and a 32GB SSD. The camera is 720p USB.

However, running with the recommended features, the 2013 Haswell Ultrabooks could fetch as high as $999 in the B.O.M. It is recommended that Haswell Ultrabooks should sport hybrid form factors, Microsoft Windows 8 connected standby, a full HD display, standalone SSD, always connected WWAN features, facial recognition, and for the corporate market, and the vPro platform.

Right now, Intel isn't certain if the Intel Core vPro platform should be a standard requirement for all business Ultrabooks.

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