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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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.