Intel Claims Haswell Architecture Offers 50% Longer Battery Life vs. Ivy Bridge

MojoKid writes "As with any major CPU microarchitecture launch, one can expect the usual 10~15% performance gains, but Intel apparently has put its efficiency focus into overdrive. Haswell should provide 2x the graphics performance, and it's designed to be as power efficient as possible. In addition, the company has further gone on to state that Haswell should enable a 50% battery-life increase over last year's Ivy Bridge. There are a couple of reasons why Haswell is so energy-efficient versus the previous generation, but the major reason is moving the CPU voltage regulator off of the motherboard and into the CPU package, creating a Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator, or FIVR. This is a far more efficient design and with the use of 'enhanced' tri-gate transistors, current leakage has been reduced by about 2x — 3x versus Ivy Bridge."

Comments

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the screen you have, I would guess. https://www.google.com/search?q=laptop+screen+wattage&aq=f&oq=laptop+screen+wattage
If you look at the first link there, you'll see that the LCD screen takes up on the order of 5W of power at full brightness. The same paper says that the power usage roughly doubles when you start blasting the CPU. If you use your laptop like I do (I'm in an engineering program at college), that's some nice savings there if they can trim the CPU usage.

What about the display?

[hawguy]

The biggest battery drain on my phone is always the display, followed by "Cell standby". How is a CPU and chipset able to promise a 50% increase in battery life when it's not even the biggest power user in the phone?

Re:Well then

[mallyn]

So what? Amtrak has seat-side power for your computers. What you say does not make sense. (

And yet...

[RMingin]

Too bad CPU power consumption hasn't been the biggest consumer of watts in many years.

Hint; the biggest amount of consumed current in most laptops is the glowing part you look at.