The Haswell Ultrabook Review: Core i7-4500U Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 9, 2013 9:00 AM ESTBattery Life
I didn’t get my hands on the Haswell S7 until a few hours after I landed in Taipei. My hotel’s in-room internet was throttled to around 2.5Mbps, which wasn’t enough bandwidth to reliably run our web browsing battery life tests. Luckily, I had my review copy of PCMark 8 on hand with its new built in battery life tests. I asked Jarred to run comparison data on the Ivy Bridge S7.
We had time to perform multiple runs on two of the tests: Home and Creative.
From the PCMark 8 Technical Guide:
The PCMark 8 Home benchmark test includes a set of workloads that reflect common tasks and activities performed by a typical person at home. These workloads generally have low computational requirements making the PCMark 8 Home benchmark suitable for testing the performance of low-cost tablets, notebooks and desktops.
The PCMark 8 Home benchmark test contains the following workloads: Web Browsing, Writing, Casual Gaming, Photo Editing and Video Chat.
The PCMark 8 Creative benchmark test includes a set of workloads that reflect tasks and activities typical of more advanced home computer users. With more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark, the PCMark 8 Creative test is suitable for testing the performance of mid-range computer systems. Your system must have a GPU with full DirectX 11 support in order to run all the workloads in the PCMark 8 Creative benchmark.
The PCMark 8 Creative benchmark test contains the following workloads: Web Browsing, Photo Editing, Batch Photo Editing, Video Editing, Media to Go, Mainstream Gaming and Group Video Chat.
As always, I calibrated both displays to the same brightness (200 nits). In the case of the Haswell based S7, I disabled all additional display power saving options in the Intel driver. Keeping in mind the new S7 has a 33% larger battery, I’m presenting both absolute battery life numbers as well as minutes per Wh for normalized comparisons.
The PCMark 8 Home battery life test is the lighter of the two, and thus has the best chance of showing peak improvement on Haswell. The results are very good:
| PCMark 8 Battery Life | ||||
| PCMark 8 Home | PCMark 8 Home (Normalized) | PCMark 8 Creative | PCMark 8 Creative (Normalized) | |
| Acer Aspire S7-391 (Core i7-3517U) | 2.83 hours | 4.857 mins/Wh | 3.35 hours | 5.743 mins/Wh |
| Acer Aspire S7-392 (Core i7-4500U) | 5.2 hours | 6.783 mins/Wh | 5.12 hours | 6.674 mins/Wh |
| Haswell Advantage | 39.6% | 16.2% | ||
In both benchmarks, Haswell ULT delivers 11 - 14% better performance and substantially longer battery life. Normalized for battery capacity, Haswell ULT offers 16% better battery life in the Creative test and almost 40% better battery life in the Home test. Note that the performance advantage pretty much disappears once we move to the Balanced power profile with the laptop connected to the wall.
| PCMark 8 Performance | ||||
| PCMark 8 Home (Power Saver) | PCMark 8 Home (Balanced) | PCMark 8 Creative (Power Saver) | PCMark 8 Creative (Balanced) | |
| Acer Aspire S7-391 (Core i7-3517U) | 1595 | 2694 | 1391 | 2508 |
| Acer Aspire S7-392 (Core i7-4500U) | 1777 | 2832 | 1583 | 2553 |
| Haswell Advantage | 11.4% | 5.1% | 13.8% | 1.8% |
Update: I made it back to the US, equipped with decent internet speeds, I was able to run our light 2013 web browsing battery life test. The increase in battery life is tremendous:
The new S7 delivers over 2x the battery life of the old model. Normalizing for battery capacity, the improvement due to Haswell is 57.5%. These results track perfectly with what we saw in PCMark 8. Workloads with greater idle time will show the biggest improvement in battery life thanks to Haswell ULT.
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Freddo - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
I wonder if this CPU is powerful enough to run the PS2 emulator PCSX2 well, it require a somewhat decent CPU.bakedpatato - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
So the M series socketed Mobile Haswells are not getting S0ix?stevechippy - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Correct, but there are U-series 28W TDP parts that aren't in the Ultrabook bracket AFAIK.Kevin G - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Typo on page 7 on the Tomb Raider 1600 x 900 test graph: "Motion Blue".http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7047/55515...
Ryan Smith - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Thanks!name99 - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
"The shift of consumer dollars to smartphones and tablets instead of notebooks and desktops won’t be reversed, but a good launch here might at least help keep things moving ok until Silvermont, BayTrail and Merrifield can show up and fill the gaps in Intel’s product stack."I love you Anand, and I love your tech analysis. But it might be worth your team acquiring a business analyst, or at least asking those sorts of questions of your informants.
Silvermont does not "fill the hole in Intel's product stack" because that hole is business-based not tech-based. We saw the prices of Haswell a few days ago --- $250 and way up. Meanwhile the price of a high-end ARM SoC is, what, $20? That's one hell of a difference.
The problem intel faces is that, for many purposes, it's perfectly adequate to pay for the $20 ARM CPU rather than the $250 Intel CPU. Silvermont and the whole Atom strategy, rather than making things better make things worse. Yes, now maybe Intel captures $20 from sale of an Atom --- but that Atom is ALSO able to replace Haswell (or at least lower-end but still more expensive Intel CPUs). The SMART Intel strategy would have been to acquire an ARM ISA license, making competitive ARM CPUs at $20 (so you still capture from that market) but at least avoid competing so directly with your more expensive line.
Intel's problems from here on out are business problems. They have to compete with an architecture that is simple enough that Apple could put together a competitive CPU starting from scratch in two years, and they have to do so using an architecture that is so complicated it took Intel 5 years to out together a competitive CPU. Meanwhile they can't charge Haswell prices to maintain the massive parallel design teams that are required to create these ever more sophisticated x86 designs.
(And, to make life even worse, apart from the myriad own goals Intel has inflicted, they have MS in the background insisting on its charges for Windows x86, one more drag on the sale x86 in the tablet market.)
I don't think things are nearly as rosy for Intel as do you. Technically yes, they are well-positioned right now. But they seem to be in the position of DEC or IBM in the early 80s --- technically superb, but with an extremely problematic business model. And it's business model that determines the future, more than technology...
rwei - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
IIRC Intel does have a full ARM license. But supporting ARM by making ARM parts competitive with Intel's x86 ones would be a blow to their future ability to extract economic rent for x86, as more software targeted at ARM became available.Much preferable to decisively beat ARM for 1-2 generations with x86 parts - if they can manage it.
peterfares - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
ARM is going to keep getting better and better with or without Intel. It might be smart for them to have the best ARM chips because then they'd get the money from people buying ARM chips. Not too much better than the rest that it impacts their x86 chips though. Either way, I'm glad that we can get affordable x86 computers. Until Android can truly compete with Windows on the bigger screens I'll stick with x86 Windows. Android is a LONG ways away from being able to replace Windows for me. Intel is in a tough position though.meacupla - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
The main short comings with ARM are the lack of processing power and the massive power consumption increase with faster chips. These chips are good enough for a majority of users and the OS' that run on them support just enough games and programs to keep those users happy.Intel, on the other hand, have chips that are fast, but need to get their power consumption and heat output lower. There's no shortage of games and programs that only run on x86, so if you need to run a specific program that won't work on ARM, your choices become quite limited.
Amagus - Sunday, June 9, 2013 - link
Is the increased battery size without increasing size/weight of the system a result of a better battery/design by Acer, or is it directly influenced by Haswell (eg lighter/smaller platform)? I noticed the thing happened with the Sony Vaio Duo Haswell design...they stuck in a bigger battery (in addition to a bigger screen) but it's weight barely went up to.