Porsche Design Unveils Fanless 15.6-Inch Ultra One Laptop
by Anton Shilov on November 19, 2019 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Notebooks
- Intel
- Fanless
- Laptops
- Porsche Design
- Amber Lake
Just like its parent company, Porsche Design specializes in the creation of devices that offer a unique set of features with an eye towards high-end styles. This month the company introduced its Ultra One laptop, which offers a 15.6-inch Full-HD touchscreen display in a chassis that is thinner than most 13-inch mobile PCs, and with a fanless cooling design, is also dead silent as well.
In terms of design, the Porsche Design Ultra One comes in a magnesium chassis with polished stainless-steel elements; the body measures 359×249.5×13.8mm and the complete laptop weighs around 1.5 kilograms. The chassis features a special hinge block that puts virtually all ports of the machine at the back in a bid to hide cables when they are in use and further emphasize ‘Apple MacBook’ style minimalism without actually removing the USB Type-A, USB Type-C, HDMI, and microSD ports. Of course, it is debatable whether these ports are in a comfortable place to use, but at least they are present.
At the heart of the Porsche Design Ultra One notebook is Intel’s low-power 8th Generation Core i5-8200Y or i7-8500Y (Amber Lake-Y) dual-core processors, which use Intel's UHD Graphics 615 and come with a TDP of just 5 W. The CPU is accompanied by 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM as well as a 512 GB or 1 TB SSD, depending on the model (see the table below for details). Since Intel designed the processor to be as energy efficient as possible, do not expect the Porsche Design Ultra One to offer performance akin to that expected from Porsche cars. What it will likely offer is a very long battery life assuming that there is a high-capacity battery under the hood.
In order to make the Porsche Design Ultra One notebook as comfortable to use as possible, the manufacturer equipped it with a backlit keyboard featuring large flat keys (I wonder what mechanism they use) with keys like PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, Ins, Del, as well as a special key to launch the Calculator app. Furthermore, the laptop has an oversized touchpad, a page from Apple’s book, and a fingerprint reader.
On the multimedia side of things, the Porsche Design Ultra One features stereo speakers co-designed with Harman/Kardon, and Cortana-supporting microphone array. For some reason, the manufacturer never mentions any webcam that is also not seen anywhere, so either it is hidden, or is not there, which is odd, given lifestyle nature of the device.
| Porsche Design Ultra One | |||
| Ultra One i5 | Ultra One i7 | ||
| Display | 15.6-inch 1920×1080 with touch | ||
| CPU | Intel Core i5-8200Y 2C/4T 1.30 GHz - 3.90 GHz 4 MB |
Intel Core i7-8500Y 2C/4T 1.50 GHz - 4.20 GHz 4 MB |
|
| Graphics | HD Graphics 615 | ||
| RAM | 8 GB | 16 GB | |
| SSD | 512 GB | 1 TB | |
| HDD | |||
| ODD | |||
| Wi-Fi | Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) | ||
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.2 | ||
| USB 3.0 | 2 × Type-A 2 × Type-C |
||
| GbE | - | ||
| Card Reader | microSD | ||
| Other I/O | HDMI, microphone, stereo speakers by Harman/Kardon, audio jack | ||
| Battery | ? | ||
| Dimensions | Width: 359 mm Depth: 249.5 mm Thickness: 13.8 mm |
||
| Weight | Starting at 1.5 kg | ||
| Additional Information | Link | Link | |
| Price | $1,350 | $1,800 | |
The Porsche Design Ultra One i5 and i7 laptops will be available in late December for $1,350 and $1,800, respectively. The company is currently taking pre-orders.
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Source: Porsche Design (via Liliputing)
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danielfranklin - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Thats a lovely design and all and looks even better up close but seriously, a Y series chip?Most OEMs are struggling to make and sell 15" Ultrabooks (U series/15w) as people expect power and less throttling at that size.
All that said, I firmly believe the 15" Ultrabook market will eventually take off as performance within 15w really holds up over the next couple years, starting with 10nm.
15" devices are used for work,no other way around it. If anyone has used a Y series in a machine intended for work will tell you, they get very slow very quickly.
They can't claim performance is good enough for glorified tablets/secondary machines like other manufacturers do with their odd shaped Y series machines.
I really hope this isn't a trend...
Beautiful machine, would love to see some of the specific design elements in practical machines.
Lenovo/Dell/HP/Acer should hire some of the guys who made this...
PixyMisa - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
First rate design, reasonable amounts of memory and storage, good selection of ports, mediocre screen, crappy CPU.deil - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
perfect TLDR.yetanotherhuman - Thursday, November 21, 2019 - link
Mediocre screen? You mean to say you don't love enormous lower bezels? Mhmm...abufrejoval - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
I could have written the same, some time ago. But I since have played around with these devices a bit and taken the many articles that AT puts out on TDP to the heart and brain.We humans are suckers for instant gratification. But instant is somewhere around 20ms (fluid/video-like), 200-300ms (shortest reaction span) to perhaps a second (attention span cliff).
So, depending on what type of interaction you do, from video game to complex transaction, you want things done in those time frames. Reactivity <20ms is a complete waste of effort, >1s causes unsocial behavior with human counterparts (not talking machine-to-machine interactions here).
While the Y-type CPUs are designed to 5 Watt TDP, they really are the very same cores that power high-end desktops (although perhaps half the cores) and that used to power "35Watt" notebooks a couple of generations ago, which only went to 4 cores very recently.
Yet they offer some IPC and even clock-rate advances, ~4GHz instead of ~3GHz for the first Skylakes at 15 Watts TDP.
So I suggest you go and find a retailer that still physical presence and actual machines to play with and test them ("Pepsi challenge"). That's what I did with an Acer that had the same class of Y-CPU pretty soon after getting myself a Whiskey Lake i7 quad: There is very little difference, except that the Y-CPU didn't have a fan.
Of course once you start compiling huge projects and run half a dozen VMs, that changes, but that's simply not what these machines are designed for.
They are designed to give you as close to instant gratification on applications that were designed by people running high-powered desktops.
And that they do, because they peak easily at 10 or perhaps even 12-15 Watts for a second or two, rev to 4GHz and then cool off while you think about what to do next. By which time they'll have built up cooling reserves to again serve at 4GHz etc., giving you effectively desktop performance at a netbook power envelope.
While a "netbook class" 10Watt TDP Goldmont Plus Atom that shares the ability for passive cooling won't deliver even half that peak performance, yet may be able to deliver a similar level of *sustained* compute using 4 cores instead of 2.
The latter machine will in many cases feel completely lame (but cheap), the "zero endurance sprinter" very much Porsche premium.
Good thing those prices don't look Porsche: I don't think the Acers are much cheaper.
danielfranklin - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
I owned the Y series XPS 13 2in1 with the "i7" Y series CPU.Doing a quick test of the machine showed it wasnt too bad.
As soon as you got going on it properly at home with a few tabs and apps open, it crawled to a halt.
Investigation showed, it was all in the CPU.
First time in 10 years i can rememeber doing desktop tasks and seeing CPU at 100% and everything else near idle.
Needless to say i sold it, and that was very much a secondary machine i used at home, mainly after hours.
flyingpants265 - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
I can't get my head around laptops. 15" is too small to do any real work. 13" is WAY too small, but too big to be portable. I guess I need a 10" tablet and a 17"? Haha..shabby - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Umm what keyboard layout is that?mjcutri - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Germanabufrejoval - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
mine!