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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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.