Low-power Haswell go into thinner and lighter devices
Intel will continue to cut the power consumption of Core-branded chips to get its mainstream silicon into thinner and thinner devices.
The chip giant said today that it will shave the power envelope of its 4th Gen Core processor, aka, “Haswell”, down to a rating of 4.5 watts. Intel calls this yardstick Scenario Design Power (SDP).
Intel had previously disclosed at Computex in June that the lowest Scenario Design Power rating for Haswell would be 6 watts. This indicates that it has made progress in ratcheting down the power consumption even more.
Laptops — Intel’s mainstay market — on the other hand, almost invariably come with fans to keep the systems cool, and, accordingly, have to be thicker and heavier to accommodate the fans.
For consumers, more power-efficient Haswell processors mean thinner, lighter laptops and hybrid laptop tablets, many presumably running Windows 8.1 and some thin enough to be fanless. Whether PC makers would use the low-power Haswell chip in a pure tablet design is not clear at this time.
Most future Intel-powered Windows tablets are expected to use the “Bay Trail” Atom chip. Bay Trail is part of the new Silvermont Atom family, Intel’s most Dell latitude e5400 battery power-frugal design — aimed at fanless devices like tablets and smartphones. Yet, it doesn’t deliver the performance of Intel’s mainstream Core Haswell chips.
The difference between a fan-equipped design and a fanless design is probably best illustrated by Microsoft’s two Surface tablets. The Surface RT tablet is a fanless design that uses a power-efficient Nvidia ARM chip. The Surface Pro model is thicker and heavier, and packs a fan to keep the more power-hungry Intel Ivy Bridge chip cool.
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