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
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.