Benchmark Results: Blu-ray Playback Efficiency
Transcoding on an Ultrabook might be far-fetched, but it's perhaps more conceivable that you'd connect a USB-powered optical drive and watch a movie on a plane.
So, we measured power consumption as a gauge of the decoding logic's offload capabilities. It's a good thing we did, too, because our results don't necessarily match up to what we might have predicted. Although CPU utilization is largely identical between the Sandy and Ivy Bridge-based Core i7 CPUs, the older HD Graphics 3000 engine uses less power during playback.
In comparison, the 17 W Ivy Bridge-based chip uses less power at a similar duty cycle compared to Intel's Core i5-2467M.