Employees now more than ever need high-performing work devices that are reliable and can deliver smart features that boost, not hamper, their productivity.
With remote and hybrid work arrangements currently the norm, PCs and laptops have become vital work devices. Notebook PCs, in particular, have seen higher demand.
Notebook shipments in Asia-Pacific climbed 12.4% last year, clocking 65.8 million units, according to IDC. The research firm attributed the strong growth to increased work-from-home and online learning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, where enterprises focused their purchases on notebooks to facilitate remote work requirements.
The shift puts greater emphasis on ensuring these devices can provide the support users need to carry out their daily tasks, especially as workloads increasingly require more compute power.
Devices that fail to meet such demands can severely impact employee productivity. In fact, users can lose up to a workday each year simply from waiting for PCs that are three years old to boot up, reveals a J.Gold Associates survey commissioned by Intel.
The study also finds that PCs aged three years and older are up to 12% less productive, costing businesses US$7,794 per user every year. In Australia, for example, employees working on PCs that are between three and four years old wait 14.06% longer for their systems to start up, losing 6.69 hours per year in productivity.
Operating sluggish work devices not only hampers your employees' ability to more quickly address critical work issues, but also can result in frustration and poor user experience.
Robust connectivity, long battery life key requirements
Online connectivity, in particular, must remain robust even when employees are no longer working out of their office network, which typically operates on dedicated leased lines and offers more stability.
Working from a home broadband network that is shared amongst family members and other smart devices can lead to congestion and spotty connections, especially if bandwidth-intensive applications such as video are running.
Laptops with limited battery life also can restrict users to specific locations within their homes, where there is a readily available power source and online connectivity is stable.
Intel® Evo™ vPro® systems are designed with such factors in mind. They provide support for Wi-Fi 6 technology, which enables fast wireless speeds and more responsive performance, including in dense environments. It facilitates faster uploads and downloads, lower latency, and longer battery life compared to solutions that offer 802.11ac technology.
The Intel Evo vPro platform also supports Thunderbolt 4 technology, delivering 40Gbps connection for data and video through a single cable connection.
Furthermore, business users who need an extended battery life can achieve this with laptops running on the Intel Evo vPro architecture. These premium systems also have the ability to wake from sleep mode in less than a second.
They are, on average, 40% more responsive while running on battery, compared to a three-year-old premium business laptop. These test results were gleaned from Microsoft Windows-based systems running 25 workflows under a typical-use environment. Power and performance may vary by use, configuration, and other factors.
In addition, Intel Evo vPro users gain higher productivity from the ability to run Microsoft Office 365 software 27% faster than previous models. These findings were from tests carried out on devices operating on 11th Generation Intel Core vPro i7-1185G7 processors, in comparison to systems with 8th Generation Intel Core vPro i7-8620U processors.
Rethinking performance with smart hardware designs
To further boost performance, Intel's integrated Accelerated Memory Scanning feature offloads memory scanning for malware to the GPU (graphics processing unit) on Intel vPro systems. Usually carried out by the CPU, such scans are typically paused or cancelled because users are frustrated over compromises in device performance, such as having applications run at a lower speed.
Moving memory-scanning operations to the GPU frees up the CPU to run software and tasks that are essential and that directly impact the employee's productivity. It also further motivates users to allow malware scans to run as scheduled, ensuring potential threats can be identified and their devices secured.
The Intel vPro platform showcases how integral the silicon layer is in delivering high-performing, enterprise-class systems that remote and hybrid workforces today need.
It is designed to provide the features modern businesses demand, offering an integrated solution that supports the latest PC technologies and delivers secured, robust performance--even when users run on battery mode.
It marries hardware-enhanced protection with modern remote management capabilities to enable organisations to better drive productivity and reduce overall costs. As importantly, Intel vPro systems provide rich user experience, so employees can perform their tasks without any compromise.
