Chip and system-level improvements that Intel is making with the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture will result in laptops out next year with longer battery life and better graphics, the company said this week.

Intel hopes to redefine the PC market with a new category of thin and light laptops called ultrabooks, but at around US$1,000, their hefty price tag leaves questions about the products' viability, attendees at the Intel Developer Forum conference said this week.

Intel on Thursday showed an experimental low-power processor the size of a postage stamp that could run PCs on solar power.

Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect technology, which shuffles data between PCs and devices like displays and external storage, could be years away from getting optical technology, an Intel executive said this week.

Intel on Wednesday announced the new 710 series solid-state drives, which the company is pitching as a replacement to hard drives in enterprise servers.

Intel hopes to boost its business selling chips to phone makers -- now the domain of rival ARM -- through a partnership announced this week with Google to develop future Android OS versions for mobile devices with Intel chips.

Acer and Asustek Computer next year will deliver Windows PCs with Intel's Thunderbolt interconnect, which for a time was available exclusively on Apple's Macintosh computers, Intel said on Wednesday.

Servers with new Xeon E5 chips based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture will become available early next year, Intel officials said on Tuesday.