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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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.