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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
87 Comments
View All Comments
broccauley - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
Were Acer not known for their "Timeline" series of laptops which were known for groundbreaking battery life?smilingcrow - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
Apple are claiming dramatically improved battery life.deeps6x - Sunday, July 14, 2013 - link
I just don't get why Intel caved to MS pressure and made touchscreen a requirement for Haswell. Everyone I know who does image editing insists on doing it on a matte screen.Metro was a huge mistake.
Gaah, just too pissed about this to make a coherent comment.
I want haswell with a matte screen and 13 and 15 inch 'ultrabook' size options. I guess manufacturers will just have to invent some new name to call their matte screen ultrabooks. Perhaps just call them 'laptops' and say screw you and your goof ass naming rules Intel.
Xenon14 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
It would be useful to see productivity and multithreaded benchmarks like Excel and Fritz. It'd be nice if you provide a few charts with higher TDP Cpu's so we can see the relative performance differences.Synaesthesia - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Wow Anand you delivered! Once again such an in-depth analysis of EVERYTHING relevant to the platform. Nowhere else can I find this information!uditrana - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Except for one thing. How did they change the backlighting in the S7. I am really interested in knowing.n13L5 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
yeah, they did a good job doing that on location and before anyone else :Dmeacupla - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
That's great news.Now, I can't wait to see it in surface pro.
B3an - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Yeah Surface Pro with one of these, in a thinner and lighter design (should be possible now) with Windows 8.1 = ultimate device.MrSpadge - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Or the Thinkpad Helix!