Intel has made live a significant refresh of the Ultrabook section of their website. If it wasn’t already clear from their $300 million Ultrabook fund, Intel is serious about Ultrabooks; the redesign of their site’s Ultrabook section is quite significant next to the old version and reinforces their commitment to the segment. The launch of Windows 8 and a wave of new devices provides an great opportunity that Intel is using highlight some of the most interesting new devices to hit the PC market in several years, most of which are Ultrabooks.

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With the release on Intel’s latest generation of processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, comes Quick Sync Video 2.0. This is an enhancement to Intel’s original Quick Sync Video technology which provides hardware encoding and decoding of video directly on the processor. All second-generation Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks feature Quick Sync 2.0 which is up to twice as fast as Quick Sync found in first-generation Sandy Bridge Ultrabooks. In order to take advantage of Quick Sync 2.0 you need to be using software that is designed to use it; a number of companies have announce support for the technology.

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AnandTech has their hands on a second-gen Ultrabook reference design and they’ve subjected it to a number of tests. They paint a good picture of the changes you will see from first-generation Ultrabooks (Sandy Bridge) to second-gen Ultrabooks (Ivy Bridge). If you’re interested in reading about benchmarks, thermals, and CPU details, and gaming performance, step inside and have a look at what AnandTech has revealed to get a glimpse of what you can expect from the next generation of Ultrabooks.

Intel’s Ultrabook campaign is quite rapidly transforming what consumers can expect from a PC laptop. They’ve driven prices and weight down, and performance and features up. I’d argue that PC laptops are looking the best that they have in recent memory thanks to Intel’s Ultrabook project. But that’s just the hardware. On the software side, we’re still dealing with Windows and the same frustrations it’s shown us for several years now. Can Microsoft up the ante with Windows 8 to bring software quality in line with Ultrabook hardware? Read the full story

It has been suggested that one of Intel’s objectives for the Ultrabook program was to move the conversation away from netbooks, where the bottom line was price — which came complete with low profit margins. And who could blame them for wanting this? Sales of Apple’s premium-priced MacBook line were strong as ever while the PC laptop market was seeing a veritable explosion of small, inexpensive machines that were marketed for their low price more than their features or quality.

I must say, it seems to be working. Have a look at this graph of searches comparing ‘ultrabook’ (blue) and ‘netbook’ (red) Google web search queries in the last 12 months:

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