Intel's Haswell Processors to Offer 50% More Battery Life in Laptops

Intel's new Haswell processors will offer 50% more battery life in laptops than the previous generation Ivy Bridge processors, according to the company.

Corporate Vice President Rani Borkar says the Haswell chips were designed with laptops and tablets in mind and the main focus was lowering power consumption. The improved battery life won't come with a cost to performance and will boost standby life by up to 20 times, reports ComputerWorld.

Haswell chips achieve their low power consumption partly from an on-chip power management unit, which provides a "bird's eye view" of energy consumption on the chip. It can dynamically adjust the power consumption in various parts of the chip to reduce the overall power draw. Voltage regulators have been consolidated, another step to reduce power consumption that also allows smaller motherboards for Haswell chips, so they can be used in smaller devices. And Intel says a type of memory called embedded DRAM reduces the cost of building devices.Faster interconnects on the chip also shave off some power use, according to Intel, because data is transferred more quickly, which means the processor cores can spend less time working.


Intel is expected to officially launch the chips at Computex in Taipei next month. Apple is rumored to be announcing MacBook updates at WWDC that will use the Haswell processor.

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