We have already covered the Ivy bridge notebook design guidelines in our piece here, but we have some things to add.

Early in September 2011, we met with Intel talking about convertibles and touch screens. While Intel didn’t go into specifics, it did say that they are working on Ultrabooks with touch and some convertible designs too.

With Ivy Bridge, this is finally happening. As for convertible or touch screen Ultrabooks, Intel now allows 2 mm (0.078 inch) thicker devices than those without. Intel allows less or equal to 21.0 mm (0.826 inches) for 14-inch systems or bigger and less or equal to 18.0mm (0.708 inch) for smaller than 14-inch systems. With touch screen or convertible,  smaller than 14'' devices can get to 20 mm (0.787 inch).

Here at Fudzilla we are the big fans of Asus Transformer, a tablet with a removable keyboard, and convertible Ultrabook with a touch screen sounds like a neat idea as well. The big downside of convertible touchscreen Ultrabooks is that it will have shorter battery life than some dual or quad core tablets, but will in turn come with more X86 horsepower.