Haswell will offer 50 per cent more battery life in laptops | Hacker News Reader

Haswell will offer 50 per cent more battery life in laptops

computerworld.com.au

22 pointsdrewjaja57 comments

Dear Manufacturers, if there's a newer tech allowing better battery efficiency, don't reduce battery capacity to maintain profit margins but instead please keep the same capacity and bump up the price slightly. People will still buy them if your product has 12-18 hours battery life while the competition has a mere 4-6 hours. We really don't mind paying extra for longer worktime.

Well battery life, at least as I've seen it on Macs keeps going up year after year so I'm pretty confident that trend will continue. Not sure about other manufacturers but only because I haven't kept up with them not a lack of confidence.

I totally agree with this, but it's less about price, and more about weight and form factor - thinner and lighter are selling points.

I'd settle for longer battery life in the same form factors we have now, but you know someone will try to sell us phones that have junk battery life and are 0.8mm thinner...

I strongly agree with this sentiment. Battery life can change the way we use our devices. I own a chromebook and three standard laptops. We rarely use the other laptops, which have larger better screens, just because the chromebook is never plugged in (except for a nightly charge), whereas the laptops will fail before the evening is over without a power source.

With respect to phones this goes doubly. I am tempted to revert back to my old B+W screened nokia just so I don't have to charge my fancy new phone every day.

Which Chromebook is that? The only ones I see have horrible battery life?

My chromebook is the first gen Samsung 5 550

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Series-550-3G-Chromebook/dp/...

Had about 9 hours when I bought it. It has dropped down now but it is still my first truly mobile laptop.

If I bought another chromebook now I would probably still prefer the old 5 550. Very good balance between battery life/power etc.

I am running Ubuntu on mine now and it is easily the most lovely computer I've ever owned.

I felt the same way about my MBA when I first got it. 8 hours of battery life! And linux runs smoothly on it. As pretty as the chromebook is, I'm not sure I'd ever want something with such weak processing power. A used thinkpad X series with wxga+ is probably more suitable (and cheaper!). With a new battery, it will also get 6+ hours.

Yeah, the weakness of the chromebook is an issue. So my uses are the following.

    Programming C and Go using vim
    Browsing the internet

If I wanted to do things like program in Java with eclipse I would be miserable instead of enchanted. So it does need to fit your uses.

The one thing I would say about the chromebook is that while I love using it, I do not love the device itself. It is cheap(ish) and plastic and mine is scratched and worn. If I owned a MBA I don't think I could use it so much as a spanner. Those MBAs are beautiful and I think this can limit their utility.

Also, my Ubuntu partition has 8gig on it. This is tiny and if I used it for anything other than vimming on text files it would probably be a disaster.

That link is the first gen? Because when I search the US Amazon for the 5 550 it says 'up to 6 hours'; that must then be the 2nd gen?

Were there two generations of the 5 550? I clearly haven't followed it closely enough. I have some kind of chromebook made by samsung. I bought it just after they were commercially released. The model under the bottom of it says 500c.

You're better off keeping the chromebook plugged in when possible; the battery loses capacity with each charge-discharge cycle.

That's true. But my life gets better every time I get to use my laptop without tripping over or fiddling some annoying cable. The chromebook just sort of fades away, a computer that is just available and portable and problem free (sort of)

I would pay any amount of money for a high res, bright sun readable, 15 hour battery, i7 with 16 gb of memory. If that costs $5k I would pay it.

Edit: thinking about it; 'any amount' here, for me, would be $7k max, but I would pay that for this configuration. That makes it such a shame you cannot really expand laptops besides some ruggedized ones. They would make a base version for $1k and allow extension up to $5-6k with all the trimmings.

I remember my old friend saying that he could use the 'hump' battery on his think pad and it'd give him around 14 hours. But that was a 14 incher. Honestly though, I think we've got enough power in todays laptops for even casual gaming over and above office work that first priority should be battery life and second should be screen resolution keeping all other equal.

I use my laptop for building apps and games (2d games, no fancy smancy 3d stuff); gcc + xcode + eclipse (or intellij for that matter) are burning a hole in my i7 (2010 mbp with 8gb and i7). Often (I live in the mountains) I have no or bad internet, so that whole 'cloud compiling' thing won't work for me. That's why performance matters for me and all performing laptops have almost no battery life :) My mbp, during ios debugging sessions, cries for power in less than 2 hours. That's horrible. My core 2 duo 2008 with new battery makes 3.5 hours, but is too slow for a lot of work and to be honest; 3.5 hours is way too little for any serious programming session.

I'm trying to get my consumption pattern down while programming by using more scripting languages (like Lua) so I don't have to compile, can do repl/live coding which seems to be nicer for battery than compiling the whole shebang.

If any devs have ideas how to make this more efficient. If I would be able to work more efficiently (which I now have been using Lua), I can buy an ARM laptop / hybrid like the Transformer prime and do most of my work on that, only going to a higher performance machine for asset (sound/gfx) creation.

I wrote a game solely on the openpandora using lua; it was actually quite a nice experience despite the tiny screen. And that thing actually does over 10 hours with one charge.

I program almost exclusively on my chromebook, with an oldish amd64 atom processor. I program almost exclusively in Go using vim. Vim is very low cpu usage and I would expect that to get you pretty far. Go is very sweet here because it has a fast, and very efficient, compiler which produces fast, and very efficient, code. All of these together might extend the battery life of your laptop. I have no experimental evidence for this though :) Go also compiles to ARM pretty well as I understand. Could be a good'un.

You can get such notebook right now (only without sun readable) with additional sheet-battery, like this: https://store.sony.com/p/Z-Series-Battery/en/p/VGPBPSC27

The problem will be it's weight.

It says not available, but I see what you mean; I did not know the Z series. But it seems low res still. 1080p is the minimum once you get use to it. But thanks for posting this because it definitely makes me aware that besides searching shallow specs I need to dig deeper into the accessories. I just imagined everyone would be as obsessed with battery life as me and so that would be the sales argument :)

The Z can have a 1080p screen if you want. It's also an extremely light laptop as is, so I think adding the extra battery won't make it all that heavy.

There's a Panasonic SX-series ToughBook that seems like it would fit all of your demands nicely, it's available with a 12.1" 1600x900 matte display, i7-3540M, RAM upgradable up to 16 GB and up to 18 hours battery life (the larger battery has almost 100 Wh). http://www.dynamism.com/top-notebooks/panasonic-sx-series.sh...

You are right; that is exactly what I want. I saw it before and forgot about it. Thanks!

If you get an "old style" laptop, like the Lenovo T-series, you get the same 60Wh battery as you always have, fully updated to the latest tech.

Laptop makers always have had old style laptops available. You're welcome to buy them any time.

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Another issue though, is that ULV chips kinda suck compared to a typical Laptop M chip. Your 35W laptop chip in the bulkier Lenovo T430s is significantly faster than say... a Surface Pro (using a ULV chip).

Either way, there are laptops out there in every configuration. Small&light battery with ULV processor (Surface Pro), Big battery with ULV processor (Samsung Series 7 Ultra Touch), Big Battery with Standard Mobile Processor (Lenovo T430s).

If you don't like small and light, then pick up a bigger model. They exist, and they've been selling. If you want 10+ hours of battery life on tiny batteries, Intel even sells Clovertrail Atoms. All of which are lighter than an iPad and offer over 10 hours of battery life.

I don't think you can get any laptop with <20W CPU and decent sized battery (~60Wh). And no, ULV chips do not suck, quite the contrary they are awesome. They combine "good enough" performance (something that ARM or Atoms can not claim) with that yummy low power consumption. But the problem is that OEMs are stuffing all those nice chips to "crappy" ultrabook bodies. I'd be mostly happy with an ultrabook with just another layer of batteries ducktaped on the bottom.

Samsung Series 7 Ultra Touch, I said it in my previous post. 57Wh battery with a ULV processor.

Its heavier than other models because it uses a full sized 57Wh battery. It also uses a dGPU because it has enough power for it.

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BTW: The ULV models are all ~30% to ~40% slower than an equivalent M model... and also cost more. 35W laptops can hold their turbo longer and offer better performance. If you're willing to sacrifice that performance for longer battery life, go on ahead.

I understand thats what most people want now-a-days however. So... yeah.

Indeed; could your parent poster maybe point out a bulky laptop with ULV chips? I don't mind bulkier if I get more battery life and higher resolution. Still the modern laptop maker idea is to cram maximal performance fitting the body; if you have a modern bulky laptop, it'll most likely have a gaming GPU and/or raid and/or huge screen on board and empty your battery faster than anything light.

I specifically pointed one out in the original post.

Samsung Series 7 Ultra Touch, 57Wh battery with 1080p touchscreen. Gets over 6 hours of battery life in rigorous use.

There is a Ultra Touch model with iGPU if you're willing to put up with weaker graphics.

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Hell, get 20+ hours of battery from the Lenovo x230 (with the slice battery attachment). http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/x-series/x...

Laptops are a PC: they come in every shape and size. You just gotta find the one you like.

Sorry, apparently that didn't catch in my brain. I think I read 'Ultra Book' instead of Ultra Touch. I knew about the X230 but that 1366 x 768 is just unworkable.

That said, with Haswell coming out soon with 50% bonus to battery life, its probably a bad idea to get a laptop right now :-p.

Haswell officially ships on June 3. IIRC, Dell will have their first models in somewhere between June and July, with additional models coming out in August. I'd expect their competitors to be roughly on the same timeline.

Yes, I wasn't going to buy now; however I'm not convinced Haswell will make that much of a difference. If an ARM Chromebook (Samsung one) cannot do more than 7 hours, I don't think Haswell will. But I might be wrong. If they manage to make the Pixel with 15 hours battery I would buy 2 and die happy. Coders like me are exceptions though, but luckily we have things in common with the Apple macbook (designers? or is that old?) crowd; high res screens and power in a comfortable, good looking package. If they could only add battery life in there...

Intel Clovertrail has been consistently getting ~10 hours on tiny 30Wh batteries.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/dell-latitude-10-64gb/4505-3...

Dell Latitude 10 gets 9+ hours on a 30Wh battery. Acer Iconia gets 10+ hours.

Mind you: the CNet battery test is rather rigorous. They play DivX video on a loop with the volume on the whole time. Real usage is likely longer than that.

Haswell is taking a whole bunch of improvements from Clovertrail, and putting it on the larger laptops. There is indeed a good chance for Haswell to hit 10+ hours, after all... Intel already released a chip that can do that.

----------------------

In fact, Intel _HAS_ to get 10+ hours of battery. AMD's newest Richland chips apparently reach 10+ hours of battery, and it'd be a shame to see Intel fall behind.

AMD Claims 13 hours of Battery on Richland on a 62Wh battery (footnote 33): http://www.slideshare.net/AMD/amd-2013-mobility-apu-introduc...

Recently... Intel has been making chips with superior battery life over AMD. So if AMD is getting 13 hours with their latest chip... Intel surely will in their update.

That's actually a great idea (thinkpad slice) since all I knew was about the hump batteries. Anyway I'm waiting out for Haswell and then I'm planning on pulling the trigger on a new laptop since I'd appreciate a nicer resolution as well and it seems that some are pushing for hi-res with haswell.

i've been holding off my laptop purchase until i got more than 8 hours of battery life. currently the best option i can think of is the x230 series, but the screen is soso.

I have expectations for haswell, and hopefully i can buy a new laptop then. But I'm not really holding my breath considering the mixed messasges we've been getting. I currently have a 480gb ssd and 8gb ram in my ultraportable. the fact that a lot of the ultrabooks have 4gb onboard, and no means to upgrade the harddrive bothers me.

The title is misleading, it should be 50% more battery life than did their predecessors. What this means is that if their predecessor's lower power usage offered an additional 10 minutes of power, Haswell will now offer an extra 15 minutes.

Why do you say it means that? It doesn't look to me as if it means any such thing. I think it means: if you got 4 hours of battery life before, you may be able to get 6 hours of battery life with Haswell processors. (But I bet this will be "up to 50% extra" and will be based on overoptimistic assumptions about the power consumption of other components.)

I can't find any source with a more direct quotation of what Rani Borkar said, unfortunately.

It's literally the first line of the article.

> Intel's upcoming family of Core processors, code-named Haswell, will offer 50 per cent more battery life in laptops than did their Ivy Bridge predecessors, according to the company.

That supports gjm11's reading.

I read that as 50% more of the total battery life, not 50% more than "the more the predecessor generation had over its predecessor generation".

Surely large chunks of the battery life are used by the screen, disk, etc.?

They are. SSD's and LED backlighting help.

Android can expose "which subsystem is using power" information to the user and applications, which is worth looking at. On phones, it's mainly screen and WAN radio.

Almost only screen on mine :)

And on Linux Intel's powertop utility can.

My sandybridge laptop jumps from 13-14W to 20W when you fully utilise the cpu. It's the difference between 4-5 hours battery to 1-2.

That would require the CPU to currently be using at least 33% of the laptop power on average, which sounds high.

My phone is currently reporting 30% on wifi and 24% on the display - and this is a small screen device that spends most of its time with the screen off.

Presumably that's an ARM CPU you have there, which is a lot more energy efficient than x86.

The story is presented to put the focus on the Haswell processor itself, and there will be saving there for sure. But I would expect that a good part if not most of the savings will come from the platform surrounding the processor. Intel has a lot of control there too, they also provide the chipset and define the requirements for the whole platform that ODMs then follow.

The PC platform for now is very inefficient. It uses standards with low power support, but typically a lot of elements are left always on and just waste power just because it is easier and up to now was not a big deal. But with the constant reduction of the CPU part now it becomes important to dynamically turn off the rest of the platform as much as possible, and not only the CPU internals. It's a given in the ARM world, and my understanding is that Intel finally brings this mindset to the PC with the Haswell platform. Which is very good and about time!

An example: the USB protocol defines Link Power Management, which allows to very dynamically put a USB link in low power (switch time is ~10 us). Supporting it will become required with Haswell from an old IDF presentation (that I've lost, so no link).

Another example: optimizing the voltages generation to avoid waste. We know part of it has been pushed into the chip with Haswell so for sure Intel looked into the whole thing.

This is obviously useful for laptops and tablets, but I would love to see this done thoroughly in mini-servers and HTPC devices. An x86 server doing nothing can burn 10 to 20W easily. A whole ARM tablet use less! I would love to see this reduced (out of principle, but also less heat and noise).

It can touch most part of the system and could be extended in time. For example in an ARM SoC for mobile it's possible to cut the internal display link between AP and LCD display if the image displayed doesn't change (the controller on the display locally cache the image). That saves the power from transferring data from the AP to the display over a high bandwidth external interface. That kind of thing could in time come to external display links.

The goal is to go all over the system with a fine comb, and make sure that when nothing happens no energy is wasted. We'll see how big a step the Haswell platform make in this direction, but it'll likely take several iterations.

Looked up up "Power Consumption Breakdown on a Modern Laptop" by Mahesri et al. and "Component-wise energy breakdown of laptop" by Kothuru et al. on Citeseer.

According to published research from 2005 and 2010, with vintage laptop processors (which were more energy hungry than ones today), you can't get 50% more battery life by even if you eliminated the CPU power usage entirely -unless you're running a CPU pegging benchmark all day.

Probably Intel marketing managed to fool the reporter into translating CPU power efficiency changes into battery life increases.

Every time I see one of these things it is fully exciting. Then the actual product gets bogged down in patent bullshit and we never see it.

What happened to the CPU heatsink where the whole damn thing rotated? If the fan in my laptop was as efficient as that thing promised to be I'd get an extra hour or so already.

Can you fit the CPU heat sink into a laptop?

A small one, sure. There's already a CPU heatsink and fan in there. If they combined them it might be even smaller. Or maybe you are right and there just isn't the space to support it.

Cached: http://www.computerworld.com.au.nyud.net/article/462749/inte...

Bodes well for the new Apple lappies, due to be announced at WWDC on June 10th.

Is there any news on how much less heat these things will produce? The heat issue is one of my biggest concerns about the current crop of ultrabooks.

Heat and (electric) power are pretty much one and the same for CPUs.

Every watt used turns directly into one watt of heat.

50% more efficiency entails a 50% heat reduction. This battery issue is a very very good thing for Intel to tackle.

I got quite excited as I read Haswell as Haskell, but if these claims hold, I'm still excited!

Sure, just make sure all the data types are defined as power-saving, then none of the code will compile until it's guaranteed to save power

...you have every reason:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_Synchronization_...

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