Skip to main content

Intel’s Haswell chip will increase laptop battery life by 50 percent

haswell-1
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Back at CES, Intel showed off a concept hybrid laptop that promised 13 hours of battery life using the company’s new 4th-gen processors (codenamed Haswell). Though it was only a concept, the thought of having 13 hours of battery life got everyone buzzing about the possibilities of the new chip. 

Now, with the fourth-generation due to launch in just over a week, we’re starting to hear a few more specifics about what Haswell can really do. Today, according to Computerworld, Intel announced its upcoming refresh to its Core processors will offer a whopping 50 percent more battery life in laptops than Ivy Bridge did – without any cost to performance. 

To be considered an Ultrabook, the laptop has to clock in at five hours of battery life, which means Haswell will give Ultrabooks at least 7.5 hours. Although it’s not as impressive as the 13 hours we saw at CES, a minimum of 7.5 hours is still a great improvement. Current Ivy Bridge laptops usually last between five and seven hours in our tests, which means these may reach 9-10 hours. Plus, according to Intel’s Rani Borkar, corporate VP and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in idle or standby mode, the chips will extend battery life by up to 20 times. According to Borkar, a power management chip will be part of the new architecture, which will help in minimizing energy drain. 

It’s no secret that PC sales have been on the decline, so this kind of boost in battery life could be a big win for laptops. We’ll have to see if this claim is true ourselves once we start testing laptops with Haswell inside, so stay tuned.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jennifer Bergen
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jennifer Bergen is the Computing Section Editor at Digital Trends and is in charge of all things laptops, desktops, and their…
The iPhone 15’s chip challenges Intel’s fastest desktop CPU — but there’s a catch
Intel Core i9-13900K held between fingertips.

Who would have thought that some of the best CPUs would face competition not from a desktop or laptop CPU, but from a mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC)? Well, the latest Geekbench 6 scores prove that it's possible. Apple's new A17 Pro chip, announced during the September 2023 Apple event and found in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, challenges AMD and Intel -- but there's a catch.

Yes, it's real. The Geekbench 6 test gives the A17 Pro chip a score of 2,914 in single-core operations, and that's mighty impressive for something that will end up in a smartphone. However, the generational leap is not that impressive -- the last-gen A16 Bionic chip is only around 10% behind in terms of single-threaded performance. The A17 Pro was built based on TSMC's 3nm technology, while the A16 Bionic is a 5nm chip, also made by TSMC.

Read more
Intel is using AI to make your laptop battery last longer
Intel's new Intel Core Ultra badge.

Intel’s upcoming 14th-gen desktop processors are expected to be a minor refresh, which is a bit of a disappointment. On the other hand, the mobile series is shaping up to be quite exciting. During this year’s Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Intel executives confirmed that the upcoming 14th-gen Meteor Lake series will be driven by AI.

Meteor Lake chips will be able to make use of AI to manage power and the transition between active and low-power states, as per information shared by PCWorld. The company is calling it the “Intel Energy Efficiency Architecture” and the AI-based power scheme can be expected to make its way into future products, including its upcoming client processors.

Read more
Intel’s 24-core laptop CPU might outclass desktop i9 processors
A render of Intel's H-series mobile processors.

Intel is pushing laptop CPU core counts to places they've never been before. The company announced its 13th-gen Raptor Lake mobile processors at CES 2023, including the flagship Core i9-13980HX which includes a massive 24 cores that could top the list of the best Intel processors.

That sounds insane considering even AMD's desktop Ryzen 9 7950X only comes with 16 cores. But Intel's cores aren't all built equally. Like the previous generation, 13th-gen mobile Raptor Lake processors include a combination of performance (P) cores and efficient (E) cores. The most powerful chips in the range come with 24 cores, but they're split across eight P-cores and 16 E-cores.

Read more