Intel: Haswell Provides 50% More Battery Life in Notebooks
Rani Borkar, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, said in a media briefing on Thursday that Intel's upcoming family of "Haswell" Core mobile processors will provide 50 percent more battery life in laptops than the previous Ivy Bridge generation. That's because the chips were designed with the power-saving needs of notebooks and tablets in mind.
But let's get real here for a moment: the CPU is just one of many power-hungry components in a laptop. To get a significant jump in battery life, the display will need to be more efficient too. However Haswell will supposedly make a noticeable difference thanks to new low power states, a full-integrated voltage regulator, faster interconnects and 20 nm process technology.
Intel claims Haswell will perform even better when in idle or standby mode, extending battery life by up to 20 times than what current processors can manage on laptops and hybrids. Borkar told reporters in the media briefing that there won’t be a tradeoff of performance for longer battery life with Haswell chips. Even more, they'll offer double the graphics performance for laptops and up.
Intel is slated to launch the new Haswell processors next month during COMPUTEX 2013 in Taipei. They're an attempt to throw the PC sector a lifeline as it struggles against the more power-efficient, more mobile and lightweight tablet and smartphone segments. Haswell will not only offer longer battery life, but encourage more hybrid solutions with touchscreens and detachable keyboards.
Haswell represents an update to Intel's instruction set architecture which it delivers every two years. Borkar said that a Haswell-based tablet will offer similar battery life to a non-Intel tablet, but more performance than a "content consumption" device. Some chips will go as low as 7 watts whereas some of the current-generation Ivy Bridge Core chips can go as low as 10 watts.
Haswell's low-power consumption is partly due to an on-chip power management unit which provides an overall view of energy consumption on the chip. This unit dynamically adjusts the power in various parts of the chip to reduce its overall power draw. Voltage regulators have also been consolidated, enabling smaller Haswell-based motherboards that can be mounted in smaller form factors.
LED provides an alternative to CCFL and it should be more efficient.
My smartphone lasts days and days without using the screen. But start using it for things like web browsing and media-watching, and you're lucky to get a day's use thanks to the screen.
Right. There won't be a 50% increase in battery life because, as the article mentioned, the CPU is only one component. Still, it's a pretty impressive achievement, even if the CPU-power savings only translate into a 10-15% increase in battery life overall.
LED provides an alternative to CCFL and it should be more efficient.
CCFL has been out of fashion for years already. The majority of laptops across all price segments have switched to LED over a year ago.
But backlighting itself is inherently inefficient since you generate white light but then scrap 2/3 of the light by passing it through RGB filters for each individual subpixel and then waste 50-100% of the remaining light by blocking it with a polarized crystal matrix. So, while the WLED backlight may be twice as efficient as CCFL, about 90% of the light produced is wasted on average. That's not counting losses within the backlight diffuser itself, bleeding around edges, coupling losses between LEDs and diffuser, etc.
If you want to increase efficiency, you have to ditch backlighting altogether and use emissive technologies like OLED then work on improving those technologies' efficiency, brightness and durability.
How about reading the entire article?
50% more battery life in standby
70% faster integrated GPU (maybe 100%)
5% faster CPU performance
5% better battery life while on-use.
At least from a performance perspective, it doesn't look like AMD will have too much of a problem catching up, CPU or APU-wise.
There is a fundamental problem with that: battery chemistries have intrinsic limits so unless you can break the laws of physics, you cannot go beyond that. Also keep in mind that higher power densities usually call for more potent reactants which are more likely to spontaneously ignite or explode so this rules out a whole class of high-energy chemistries.
In other words, do not expect cost-efficient intrinsically safe batteries to get much better than they already are.
Also, even if you had an infinite-power battery, you would still want a highly power-efficient APU in your tablet - I doubt anybody would want a scorching-hot tablet from 200W getting heatsinked into its chassis... even the Tegra3's 3-4W in my Nexus7 is already enough to make the SoC area uncomfortably hot for my taste when playing games for more than a few minutes at a time.
While more battery power may be nice, I would be far more interested in reducing power draw and associated temperature gradients across the frame.
What kind of kool-aid are you drinking ?