The Haswell Ultrabook Review: Core i7-4500U Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 9, 2013 9:00 AM ESTGPU Performance
With a modest increase in EU hardware (20 EUs up from 16 EUs), the Intel HD 4400 GPU in the Core i7-4500U I’m testing today isn’t tremendously faster compared to the HD 4000 in the i7-3517U. On average I measured a 15% increase in the subset of game tests I was able to run in Taipei, and a 13% increase in performance across our 3DMark tests. The peak theoretical increase in performance we should see here (taking into account EU and frequency differences) is 19%, so it doesn’t look like Haswell is memory bandwidth limited just yet.
If we throw 35W Trinity into the mix, HD 4400 gets closer but it's still far away from 35W Trinity performance:
| GPU Performance Comparison | ||||||
| Metro: LL - Value | Metro: LL - Mainstream | BioShock Infinite - Value | BioShock Infinite - Mainstream | Tomb Raider - Value | Tomb Raider - Mainstream | |
| Core i7-3517U | 15.4 fps | 6.0 fps | 16.4 fps | 7.0 fps | 20.1 fps | 10.2 fps |
| Core i7-4500U | 14.5 fps | 6.5 fps | 17.4 fps | 9.9 fps | 24.6 fps | 12.2 fps |
| A10-4600M | 16.8 fps | 8.0 fps | 25.8 fps | 10.0 fps | 30.1 fps | 12.7 fps |
For light gaming, Intel’s HD 4000 was borderline reasonable. Intel’s HD 4400 takes half a step forward, but it doesn't dramatically change the playability of games that HD 4000 couldn't run well. Personally I’m very interested to see how the 28W Iris 5100 based Haswell ULT part fares later this year.
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Homeles - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Maybe you didn't catch on with Anand's "I was running this in my hotel room" statement, but the idea was to get the anxiously awaited battery life numbers out to the public.seapeople - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
You mean a hotel room in Taiwan is not the normal procedure for a pedantically complete review?ciparis - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
OT: Opening paragraph typo: "Haswell less than a month after the arrival of a new CEO,"jhoff80 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
I know you said that you disabled any Display Power Savings options in the Intel driver, but still, out of curiosity, it would be interesting to know what kind of effect those have. I mean, it wasn't made explicit, but does this specific ultrabook support Panel Self Refresh? If so, what improvements does that give?yoyoma245 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
I don't understand why battery life increased going from pcmark8 home to pcmark8 creative. Wouldn't a more demanding test suite result in reduced battery life?meacupla - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Could Minecraft be added to benchmarks for ultrabooks?HD5000 is obviously quite pitiful at eye candy games, so how about popular games that are most likely to be played on them?
I get around 34~40fps with surface pro, which is playable, but could be better.
esgreat - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
I don't think I've seen benchmarks for HD5000 yet. The i7-4500u uses HD4400 graphics.With 2x the EUs, HD5000 should give quite a performance boost, but not as fast as Iris.
krumme - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Haswell U improves excactly where it was needed; on the battery life. This segment dont need more cpu power or gpu power than ib, they want battery life.This is the luxury product that ultrabooks are made for.
Haswell for the desktop was utterly unimportant, but this is excellent targeted and a very tangible improvement for everyone.
name99 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
"Haswell for the desktop was utterly unimportant"Uhh, well apart from defining a rather different parallel programming model going forward...
krumme - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Yes. Thats relevant in perhaps 5 years from now. Perhaps. Its a technology and innovative huge step forward, but hardly of any pratical importange to the consumers today.