4600 HD vs. Iris Pro 5200 Battery Performance

If I had a laptop with the same specs but with two different iGPU (and of course CPUs) they would have different battery draw right ? I know the TDP of the CPU that use both the processor are around 47w and TDP isn't really the measure of battery drain . I am right to think that the Iris Pro 5200 would draw a lot more power right ? Since it's so much more powerful ?

 

At idle they would be very similar.

Only at higher loads will they show any differences - and even then they might trade 'wins' depending on the workload you're testing them with.

Another thing to consider is that if your workloads are stressing both cpu and igpu modules at the same time; then the Iris Pro will probably use more power 'at that instance'.

If the workload is 'fixed' - the Iris Pro should finish the set task faster and will give better (overall) battery life.

If the workload is ongoing - then the Iris Pro will give worse battery life - but will produce more results.


The best bet is to get the Iris Pro with the highest capacity battery the system comes with - then you'll have the most battery life and/or the most performance as needed.


Hope this helps.

 

At idle meaning not internet browsering right ? Just sitting at desktop ?

I'm more question just light task like surfing the web / word processing, I would think both CPU would drain pretty fast under any kind of heavy production software so when I do that I'll be plugged in .

Because right now I'm weighting wither the 4600 HD + NVIDIA 740m DDR3 is worse or better then the Iris Pro 5200 stand-alone .

 

Sorry, should have stated; idle/low loads. So light browsing (1 or 2 tabs) would be included in that estimate.

I would think that any GPU with DDR3 would be worse than the Iris Pro?

But I'll let others with more direct experience answer that one for you.

 

Absolutely avoid any GPU with GDDR3 like the plague, don't even consider it. The FPS numbers don't tell the full picture, while it might post comparable FPS figures to a GDDR5 equivalent, the memory bandwidth starvation results in really bad latency spikes unless your game is very very well optimized. You will also drop at least 50%-75% performance when moving to higher resolutions or applying AA instead of the more typical 20-33%. This means that the GDDR3 equipped GPU is worse than useless at resolutions higher than 1366x768.
The Iris Pro has no memory bandwidth starvation so I'll imagine its very comparable to GDDR5 graphics cards.
In terms of power, the Iris Pro draws slightly more power at idle compared to the HD4600 only but will draw less power than a CPU+dGPU solution. At load, the Iris pro should draw much less power than the dGPU solutions though your Turboboost may be slightly neutered since the TDP is shared.
Finally, the Iris Pro is far superior to any mobile chip (and rivalling the desktop chips) at transcoding and other Memory intensive operations (e.g. WinRAR) due to the massive low latency, high bandwidth 128mb L4 cache.