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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FwFred - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Single package instead of two, integrated VRs instead of discrete. Perhaps this allows a smaller mainboard and allows a bigger battery?piroroadkill - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Not impressed.Yeah, the idle time battery life is better, but that GPU is super-lousy. In my opinion, Intel have done themselves a massive disservice by making crappy GPUs available with Haswell. The choice should be only 5100 and 5200. The others are a total waste of time, and barely interesting over HD 4000.
nunomoreira10 - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
There is not a single 5100 17w sku, and the reason is power.intel is going the nvidea and amd road, choices, this is the budget i7, want more, pay more.
mikebelle - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
I still think he has a point though. While some consumers may prefer the battery life and/or cost savings. Intel seems to have made it very difficult to get access to any of there 5000 series graphics. I wouldn't be surprised to see Iris and Iris Pro come to a few Core i5 parts during Haswell's "refresh".samkathungu - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Is it just me or are the releases coming from Intel about all the flavours of Haswell getting a little confusing? Probably a better communications strategy next time will benefit consumers.The confusion over what graphics ships with the desktop or mobile parts is not pleasant.
vipw - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Maybe I'm bad at counting, but it still looks like there are two chips on the package.sheh - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
When are the i5 43xxM and 42xxM are going to be available?darthrevan13 - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
So no more PCIe 2.0? Will Thunderbolt be available for ULT/ULX processors? You could in theory connect a dGPU through that, right?Sugardaddy - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
On page 2, you state that "any hopes for pairing a meaningfully high performance discrete GPU with Haswell ULT are dead."But there is a lot of Ultrabooks coming out like the Aspire S3-392 with a discrete GT 735M, which is probably 50%-100% faster than the 620M in last year's Asus UX32VD.
How does that fit together? Is the 735M not "meaningfully faster" than HD4400/HD5000?
Thanks!
extide - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
I was hoping charlie would be wrong. Sadly, he was right, Intel took away PCIe 3.0 and all CPU based PCIe lanes from this CPU. This is how the kill off AMD/nVidia competition, make it literally not an option. Scary as hell, I hope they don't start doing this to higher TDP SKU's.