The Haswell Ultrabook Review: Core i7-4500U Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 9, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance
With Haswell on the desktop we showed a 0 - 19% increase in performance over Ivy Bridge at the same clocks. With Haswell ULT, similar parts have identical turbo frequencies but Haswell does drop the base clock by 100MHz in this case. There’s also a lower TDP, and that TDP now includes the PCH as well, potentially decreasing the time spent in max turbo.
The end result is effectively no gain in performance across our benchmarks. PCMark 7 and single-threaded Cinebench show a 3 - 6% increase in performance, while multithreaded Cinebench and x264 show a 3 - 5% decrease in performance.
As we saw in our battery life tests, it looks like there are some larger performance gains to be had in power limited scenarios. The explanation there makes sense. Haswell ULT’s lower TDP may cap max frequencies more than on Ivy Bridge, but at lower frequencies the CPU cores are less likely to bump into the chip’s TDP limits - allowing Haswell’s IPC advantage to really shine. When plugged in however I wouldn’t expect CPU performance any different from Ivy Bridge.
| CPU Performance Comparison | ||||||||
| PCMark 7 | Cinebench 11.5 (single threaded) | Cinebench 11.5 (multithreaded) | x264 5.0.1 - 1st pass | x264 5.0.1 - 2nd pass | PCMark 8 Home (Power Saver) | PCMark 8 Creative (Power Saver) | ||
| Core i7-3517U | 5058 | 1.25 | 2.8 | 29.67 | 5.55 | 1595 | 1391 | |
| Core i7-4500U | 5216 | 1.33 | 2.7 | 28.4 | 5.25 | 1777 | 1583 | |
| Haswell Advantage | 3.1% | 6.4% | -3.5% | -4.3% | -5.4% | 11.4% | 13.8% | |
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JDG1980 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Do Haswell notebook chips have the same crazy high temperatures on full load that the Haswell desktop chips do?dealcorn - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
I am not comfortable with your suggestion that DEVSLP's 2 mw benefit shows exclusively/primarily when the system is asleep. I sense a big benefit at low loads because the SSD's can slip in and out of DEVSLP really fact. Let's have some testing, at your leisure. Will a SSD be in DEVSLP state 50% of the time while watching non HD video? I suspect power requirements during DEVSLP is the new idle power measurement for typical home use and SSD reviews should be revised accordingly.Everything else: Bravo!
Sivar - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Typo:"Haswell less than a month after the arrival of a new CEO"
Just trying to help out. :)
kallogan - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
What a tech revolution, a bigger battery gives a bigger battery life.FwFred - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Reading is FUNdamental: "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."Emphasis mine.
kallogan - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Scam. A well optimised ivy lap would do the same.Egg - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Proof?Homeles - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
I see that reading comprehension is not your strong point.kallogan - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
I just need more than one Haswell based laptop review to draw any conslusions.seapeople - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
Me too. I think Anand should have held any Haswell reviews until we've had a good five years for industry to comprehensively adopt the architecture and fundamentally evaluate the aggregate system stability on an enterprise-wide scale. Then he could submit all the reviews he had saved up.