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:What about the display?

[msauve]

I'd be interested to know what phone you have, that uses an Intel Ivy Bridge server/desktop/laptop processor.

Barry Life or CPU Power Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Well then

[dicobalt]

Or, very right.

No, that's not it.

[DragonWriter]

My laptop consumes most of its power via the discrete GPU, display and other peripherals. I know, since if I switch from the good GPU to the crappy one, and dim the screen, my battery life goes from 2.5 to 5 hours. Thus, with everything on, at least half the power draw can't be CPU, so there is no way this could double my battery life.

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.

But, when idle, with a dimmed or off screen, yes, it could help a lot. Apparently Haswell has some major improvements to handling network (including wifi) packets when in low power modes, and this should be a big win. I assume this kind of situation is where they got the 2x number

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])

Re:What about the display?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

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.