The Haswell Ultrabook Review: Core i7-4500U Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 9, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
On the desktop, Haswell offers a reasonable increase in IPC, and a decrease in idle power consumption. The combination of the two feel very evolutionary over Ivy Bridge however. In high-end notebooks, Iris Pro dramatically improves the processor graphics story by finally delivering discrete GPU class gaming performance. In Ultrabooks, Haswell’s offer is dominated by significant improvements in battery life.
Intel refers to Haswell ULT’s performance in Ultrabooks as being the single largest improvement in battery life of Intel history. As far as I can tell, that’s true. Under heavy load I wouldn’t expect any substantial increase in battery life, however most notebook usage models boast significant periods of idle time. Staring at your screen, browsing the web, or even multitasking all offer opportunities for idle power optimizations to kick in. That’s where Haswell ULT excels. Using Acer’s Aspire S7 as a comparison platform and normalizing for battery capacity differences I measured anywhere from a 15% to a 60% increase in battery life thanks to the move to Haswell.
Peak CPU performance doesn’t really change with Haswell ULT. Performance on battery on the other hand does improve by a bit over 10%. On the GPU side you should expect to see around a 15% increase in performance compared to last generation’s HD 4000 GPU. Neither improvement is significant enough to dramatically change the performance class of Ultrabooks, but the situation at least improves.
With the last generation of Ultrabooks, the tradeoff between portability and battery life was more evident than ever. The Ultrabook targeted Haswell U-SKUs aim to change that. Based on what I’ve seen here, they will.
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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.