Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, is one of the largest tech trade shows in the world with 1,700 exhibitors at this year’s get together where Intel INTC -0.43% (INTC) introduced many new innovations. One of them is a new line of Haswell processors to be used by Sony (SNE) to power its Vaio Pro for up to 25 hours without a charge. The new Vaio Pro will be available by the end of June in Europe.
Haswell’s improvement in battery life is even better than the targets Intel[/entity] had set when it had initially announced it was working on Haswell. Clearly, Intel did not have its head buried in the sand and saw the shift in consumer buying from laptops to tablets such as iPads from Apple (AAPL). iPads are great for content consumption but lack in capability for content creation, sophisticated graphics and heavy duty analysis that requires significant computing power.
Haswell provides most of the advantages of a tablet along with heavy duty computing power and battery life that is potentially better than many tablets on the market. Haswell provides 50% improvement in the battery life when the device is actively used and as much as 300% improvement in the standby mode compared to previous generation of Ivy Bridge processors from Intel. Intel accomplishes this while boosting performance by 15%.
Two Innovations Behind The Feat
First, Intel moved the voltage regulator to its CPU chip. This eliminates up to seven third party integrated circuits previously used for voltage regulation tasks. Second, Intel took a big leap in managing power at a more granular level than ever seen before. The system is capable of shutting down everything that is not being used and then bringing it back up immediately. The result is tremendous improvement in power consumption….Read more at Forbes