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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."
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.
I'd be interested to know what phone you have, that uses an Intel Ivy Bridge server/desktop/laptop processor.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Is this seriously 50% increase in battery life? Or just 50% reduction in power usage by CPU? The article wasn't clear on this. I'm assuming the power usage thing.
Amdahl's law applies to performance, not really geared toward power. Unless you would like to enlighten the class with a mathematical explanation of your assertion?
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Without checking the source, i bet it is only the cpu/gpu/power thtat is getting lower values. It is the old intel story again. First it was the atom cpu that was supposed to be super low power. However they forgot to mention you needed a chitset along with it for the video networking pci that was not so super savy with power.
Now the cpu/gpu is super power savery. But the wifi/display/battery/2g/3g/nfc/audio/cam/gps might still drain your battery in 3 seconds.....
Is this a laptop only chipset, or does intel have goodies for those who like to be chained to their desks?
Or, very right.
Like most CPU's these days, they produce a lot of variants.
For this article they are likely talking about the "U" variant with 15W TDP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)#Mobile_processors
You can't really compare that with the (or say in same breath) desktop "K" variant with 84W TDP (also has twice the cores and threads).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)#Desktop_processors
I am pretty sure the benchmarks will be wildly different. Anyway the summary makes it sound like it is all one thing. I am sure it will be very good and all, but I know I won't be getting one of those power saving versions. POWER! (To quote Clarkson)
Maybe with the old fluorescent backlights, but not these days. A typical LED backlight on a laptop draws something like 3 watts at maximum brightness. It isn't lost in the noise, but it is by no means the main power draw. The CPU, chipset, and RAM take way more current.
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Math tip: A 50% increase in battery life (what they actually claimed) isn't the same as doubling it.
Also, since a big selling point for Haswell (aside from power efficiencies) is the claimed greatly improved (~2x for laptop-oriented models, ~3x for desktop-oriented models) improvement in graphics performance, I'd be very surprised if their claims for about battery life were focussed on systems using discrete GPUs rather than relying on the integrated graphics on Haswell.
Well, except that they explicitly claimed that was overall battery life, and it was a 50% increase not 2x, and they actually cited numbers for improvement in idle life and it was much higher than the +50% claimed overall (or even the 2x you pulled out of who-knows-where), since their claimed idle-mode improvement was twenty times (TFA is less clear on this, but Computerworld covers the same event with more specificity: "And in idle or standby mode the chips will do even better, extending battery life by up to 20 times, [Rani Borkar, Intel's Architecture Group VP] said." [emphasis added])
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.
Yes screen technology is important.... Pixel Qi technology seems to be ignored and should not
Especially on laptops that mate well with a docking station for "work".
A big quality display at the office is a good thing. Especially on that has been rotated to be tall. The ability to have a very low power transmissive/ reflective display while mobile and a serious display at a desk at work is under served.
Docking station tech is lame at best. First the battery charging logic is flawed. The charger should disconnect from the battery once it is charged. It should test the battery once an hour thereafter and decide what to do. I cannot tell you how many batteries I have had die from long term over charging and lack of correct dynamics in use.
A docking station should have cooling designed to keep the battery as well as the CPU/logic cool. Most obstruct air flow and do neither well.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Source? This is the first I've heard of this, I haven't seen any articles on the subject, so this would be very enlightening. Generally Thinkpad quality is very high, even if their screen quality went to garbage starting around Thanksgiving 2012... It would be interesting to see more details on this, as I have been tracking the downward spiral of Thinkpad quality ever since the Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing announced that they were going to square off the Thinkpad vs Ideapad brands under lenovo at the cost of giving users worse quality products under both brands....
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Amdahl's laws are many.
Here are four of them.
0. Amdahl’s parallelism law: If a computation has a serial component S and a parallel component P, then the maximum speedup is (S+P)/S.
1. Amdahl’s balanced system law: A system needs a bit of IO per second for each instruction per second: about 8 MIPS per MBps.
2. Amdahl’s memory law: alpha=1: that is, in a balanced system the MB/MIPS ratio, called alpha, is 1.
3. Amdahl’s IO law: Programs do one IO per 50,000 instructions.
Corollary:
In any discussion of computer architecture, at least one member of the set of Amdahl's laws is bound to be relevant.
Really? Amdahl's law is:
Tn = a + (1-a)/N
Where Tn = Time with N cores
N = Number of Cores
a (should be alpha) = fraction of instructions in serial code.
What you are talking about is:
Bp = (1-((Pt - Pc)/pt))*100
While Amdahl is significant to the computer science world, are you claiming he invented percentages?
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They had a very decent boost last year with ivy. I went from a sandy bridge laptop to an ivy and the battery life doubled.
That's nothing, wait till you see the Tacoma Bridge chips they're planning for the next year. I've heard they've made a real break-through with them.
Ezekiel 23:20
Is that marketing speak for "we were unable to increase the operating frequency"?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Wait, I thought Adama's law was: The only good toaster is a dead toaster.
This means you are going to have to 1) have redundant regulation on the mo-bo for other components,
Nope. Motherboards already had dedicated regulators just for the CPU.
High-speed CPU core logic needs very low supply voltages, around 1.0V these days. Lower speed parts built in older processes need higher voltages -- 1.2V, 1.5V, 1.8V, or more. There's not much on the motherboard which even can share supplies with the CPU. Also, CPUs now dynamically vary their own core voltage (by sending commands to the regulator) in order to save power. That wouldn't work so well with other chips sharing the same regulator.
It's been a very long time since the regulators which powered the CPU core also powered any other chips on the motherboard.
and 2) subject your CPU to much higher (and unregulated) voltages. You've added another heat generation source right there on the CPU, and power excursions are likely to take out your processor.
Who said the input to a regulator must be unregulated? Current x86 systems already convert one regulated voltage to others. The ATX power supply outputs regulated 12V DC to the motherboard, which is then converted to several low voltages to supply the CPU and other devices. Haswell's integrated voltage regulators accept 1.8V input, so in practice they're going to be fed by a 1.8V regulator on the motherboard.
Heat doesn't appear to be that big a deal. The top desktop TDP bin is going from 77W (Ivy Bridge) to 84W (Haswell). The total system power is going down, not up -- despite the extra conversion step, the integrated voltage regulators offer efficiency gains.
(One is that it's now practical to have a lot of independent power domains. Haswell apparently has no less than five independent power planes. This makes it possible to dynamically adjust the voltage of different portions of the chip independently, giving a better match between activity level and power use. Another gain is that it's difficult and inefficient to supply a very low voltage at very high current over long distances. This is why nobody was ever even slightly interested in extending the ATX spec to supply ~1.0V directly to the CPU. Haswell puts the high current / low voltage supply as close to the load as it possibly can go.)
Then perhaps the next step is to build user interfaces that aren't based on scrolling or other smooth motion, so that something with a laptop form factor and an e-ink display becomes viable.