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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Rogatti - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
GPU Intel.........no thanks !!!!!Kaveri ... where is you !!! ... do not let me down !
A5 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Anything based on Steamroller isn't going to be able to touch these battery life numbers.If you don't care about battery life, you can get much better value for your money outside of the ultrabook form factor.
Samus - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
The GPU performance is slowly creeping up to AMD; AMD won't be able to use their GPU as a crutch much longer.Death666Angel - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Just the ridiculously lower price.kyuu - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Yeah, because AMD isn't going to be improving their iGPU tech at all...?nunomoreira10 - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
not really, intel currently uses an abnormal 180mm2 of die area on 22nm (hd5000) for the same perfomance and efficiency of an 80mm2 28nm amd gpu.the are trying to go all out, but their gpu tech basically sucks
smartypnt4 - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Where'd you see the analysis of how much space HD5000 takes? I haven't seen anything on that. Maybe I just missed it...180mm2 of die area for Haswell ULT total is what's been reported, and AMD's Trinity 4C at 28nm is 246mm2. The number of transistors in each is basically identical. The difference comes in where Intel and AMD spend transistors. I'd wager that AMD spends more transistors in GPU, and Intel spends more in CPU.
To be frank, I don't see how you can assert that Intel's <90mm2 of graphics on an integrated chip has appreciably lower efficiency than any other mobile part on the market. I could be wrong, but I just don't see it as that far off.
smartypnt4 - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Never mind. Found Anand's analysis. There's no way that's correct though. If 1/2 of GT3 takes up 87mm2, then full GT3 takes up 174mm2. Haswell 2C ULT is a 184mm2 die. There's no way the GPU takes up 90% of the chip. Over half, sure. but 90% is ridiculously high. Something in the 75-80% range is the absolute highest I'd expect.Homeles - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
A bit disappointed to see the CPU performance largely stand pat compared to Ivy bridge, but it nailed the one major thing that mattered: battery life.GPU performance isn't awfully inspiring either. I suppose that I won't see the performance gains I was hoping for until Broadwell.
Oh well. I suppose Fall IDF isn't too far away.
meacupla - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Well, i7-4500U is clocked 100mhz slower, but haswell IPC is about 10% better, so obviously CPU performance is not going to differ by much.GPU performance for HD5000 is pretty much what was expected from early intel slides. Iris pro is what was touted as performing up to 'more than 2x' performance.