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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warezme - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
"the processor graphics story by finally delivering discrete GPU class gaming performance". I hate this summation being thrown around, as I'm sure it will get re quoted somewhere as gospel. It is definitely NOT discrete GPU class gaming performance in any shape or form. There should be a limit to what is considered discrete GPU performance, like maybe 30-60FPS at, at least 1600x900 resolution and game settings across the board for all games set to Medium. That is not crazy or unreasonable for a true discrete GPU you would actually go out and buy. It shouldn't be unreasonable than to expect that in a built in GPU that is sold as "discrete GPU" quality.gnx - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Kudos! You have to love AnandTech for providing such detailed analysis, so soon after Haswell was made public!But it does seem that Haswell for Ultrabooks isn't so revolutionary as Intel seemed to imply. Not that we have much of a choice, since ARM isn't an option, and AMD doesn't provide much of an alternative, but I was personally hoping for more from Haswell.
Maybe it's change the equation for Windows Tablets? look forward to more from AnandTech!
Kiijibari - Monday, June 10, 2013 - link
Can you please add Wh numbers in the Battery Life Test graph (http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7047/55504... or normalize them at least like in the previous tables? Seems to me that you compare 2 different batteries there. Haswell is great sure, but not THAT great ;-)Yes it is explained in the text below, but a picture not matching the numbers in the text is useless and misleading. A picture should be worth more than 1000 words and not demand reading 1000 words of explanation ;-)
broccauley - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
Does anyone know what the status of "activity alignment" for power optimisation is on the Linux kernel and how it compares with Windows 8? I assume such techniques were added when the changes from the Android branch were merged?Henry 3 Dogg - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
"And today, we had to track down a pre-production Haswell Ultrabook in Taiwan to even be able to bring you this review of Haswell ULT."And today, a day later, you can pick up a production Haswell ULT based MacBook Air in your local Apple store.
lhurt - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
So are Platform Activity Manager (Windows) and Timer Coalescing (OSx) two different OS implementations of the same idea, to take advantage of Intel's Power Optimizer and are Haswell cpus required to get the benefit?fteoath64 - Saturday, June 15, 2013 - link
"Any hopes for pairing a meaningfully high performance discrete GPU with Haswell ULT are dead."This is Intel's method of CLOSING other discrete GPU solution on their cpus towards the future. This is a predatory move and premeditated !. Just stop buying their chips as this is forcing users into a proprietary path using their inferior gpu technology. It is a selfish and disgusting move. Now ARM is going to cream them on the desktop side as well soon and server side in time.