The Ivy Bridge generation of Ultrabooks, all summed up under Chief River Ultrabook platform, shares a lot of form factor requirements with the current generation of Ultrabooks, codenamed Huron River.

The maximum size, or Z-axis as Intel calls the thickest part of your notebook, remains the same, less or equal to 21mm for 14-inch systems and above, and less or equal to 18mm for smaller systems, under 14 inches.

The baseline processors are Ivy Bridge parts with 17W TDP and even Sandy Bridge can fit this platform. The new members of Intel’s Ultrabook family are convertible sub-14-inch designs that can be as thick as 20mm.

The basic requirement for battery life is 5 hours in Mobile Mark 2007, but Intel recommends that the battery life should go towards the 8-hour mark and beyond. For connectivity the baseline is Wi-Fi but it’s recommended to have Intel WiDi support as well. Baseline for wired connectivity is USB 3.0 and / or Thunderbolt. The most interesting part is the recommendation for touch screen support, GPS, accelerometer, proximity sensor and ALS (Ambient light sensor).

Chief River Ultrabook have to wake up in under seven seconds to fit the specification and the new guideline is to have storage that scores more than 16000 in PCmark Vantage and HD sub editing score for Video editing of 80MB/s.

A minimum of 16GB of SSD storage is required now, it wasn’t with the current Sandy Bridge Ultrabook. In current generation based on Huron River it’s ok to have an HDD in an Ultrabook, but they are out in the next generation. Even the cheapest Chief River will have to be equipped with some SSD storage, which opens the doors to more hybrid drives. However, users will have to see storage as a single drive regardless of the possible SSD+HDD storage combo. Intel reminds manufactures that SSD is recommended.

Overall, Intel’s Chief River 2012 Ultrabook platform looks like a slightly improved version of the original Huron River Ultrabook. Core i7 and i7 with 17W Ivy Bridge 22nm processors should be ready in May with possible launch date of platform at Computex, June 5 till 9th 2012.