Why a lot of Haswell laptops are using low power processors ?

Trying to find a good laptop, I stumbled on a ridiculous high number of models using haswell's low powered processors, this includes dell and thinkpads and others ..

i3 4xxxU
i5 4xxxU
i7 4xxxU

Why is that ?

What is wrong with i3/i5/i7 4xxxM processors ?

Is there anywhere a list of of all models that are using non low power processors ?

 

There's nothing 'wrong' with the 4xxxM cpu's... its just that a lot of the market is focused towards low power and energy efficiency.
Those low powered cpu's also seem to be adequate for a lot of peoples basic computer requirements.
Ergo... the 4xxxM cpu's end up in far more expensive laptops and are usually more oriented towards 'enthusiasts' and 'gamers'

 

You don't get a lot of improvement in performance in return for a lot more power consumption.

Here are a few sample results from the notebookcheck Mobile CPU benchmark list.

You need to go to quad core to see a big boost in performance but this will only occur if applications can run multi-threaded to use all the cores.

John

 

Considering that most basic users can use XP-era and Vista-era hardware just fine, Haswell's ULV processors offer plenty of performance for their needs. And, like said above, there are still laptops with full-voltage CPUs for specialist needs.

Most of the time, you'd see a bigger (and subjectively noticeable) improvement by upgrading to a SSD rather than a more powerful CPU anyway.

 

Possibly cooler CPU's = less $$$ for thermal design??

True in most cases, but once you have upgraded to a top-end SSD, then the CPU can often become the next bottleneck.

 

Cheaper thermal design is one reason as well. Another would be to be able to use lower-capacity batteries since a -U CPU can squeeze out more runtime out of it than a -M.

It's true that the CPU could become a bottleneck after getting a SSD, though that really only applies to CPU-intensive tasks (gaming, CAD, etc.). For most Average Joe tasks, the biggest bottleneck after that would be their internet connection (a faster CPU isn't going to load that YouTube video any faster) .

 

Less money and significantly less thickness to accomodate a fan able to shift enough air to dissipate the heat (or go to a multi-fan solution which would push up the cost).

The bottleneck on my computer is usually the user. There are occasions when the CPU is the bottleneck but I'm not keen to substantially sacrifice portability (including a size or two bigger PSU) in favour of significantly reduced processing times. Instead, I leave the CPU to get on with its work and I get on with something else.

John

 

the problem with standard voltage models is thermal dissipation becomes much more complicated and expensive (e.g. custom sintered heatpipes) in machines with a thinner chassis. The additional cost of the ULV chips is quickly dwarfed by the cost of the complex cooling assembly, heat tolerant capacitors + ICs + SMTs surrounding the CPU and heat shielding for the battery (Lithium Polymer is especially sensitive to heat as it actually expands compared to conventional lithium ion) if they were to use standard voltage models.

 

it is just a shame that I cant seem to find a budget laptop with descent processor, all i can find are processors that perform like sandybridge, seems like a waste of money.



i wonder though if anyone has a recommendation for laptop models that still offer normal processors,


Lenovo .. (G510/B5400), but the g510's whitelist is un-crackable, and they are not upgradable to 1920x1080, and their OEM wifi adapters sucks.

Dell .. all their insipiron laptops have low power, so they are out.

HP .. I have serious concerns about the terrible quality of the fan and touchpad of their budget laptops, from multiple previous terrible experience.

Any other recommendation ?

 

You could fill out the sticky in the WNBSIB subforum to let us know what you plan on doing with the laptop. Honestly though, if all you do is basic tasks such as Office, Internet, Youtube, etc, then the Haswell -U CPUs would be powerful enough (as well as older CPUs like the Sandy-Bridge lineup).

 

No offense but you can't (and shouldn't) expect too much from budget laptops. They're cheap for a reason.

 

No offense taken.

My budget is limited, so trying to get the best I can now, I am only trying to get best bang for the buck, cant justify paying a price today for the same ~3 year old performance, for the sake of power saving, which i do not care about.

I want to get 2 laptops:
- 1 will be used for 3d max/auto cad/photoshop stuff,
- 1 will be used to vmware and heavy multi-tasking, enough to fill 16gb of ram and rely on pagefile.

I will start a thread in WNBSIB subform in a few hours.

 

Your workflow doesn't seem to 'require' two notebooks.

I would be looking at a Dell M6800 (as an example).

With 32GB RAM multiple HDD/SSD's and the latest available Intel I7 QC platform.

Not light. Not quiet (when working flat out) and not small.

But it will be a better fit than two systems I would guess (with the information you've given so far).

 

Agreed with tiller, in that a well-outfitted workstation should easily be able to handle both workloads. For CAD especially, you're going to want something with a Quadro or FirePro GPU, and for everything you describe a quad-core Intel CPU would be required as well.

A budget consumer-class laptop wouldn't have any hope of doing most of those tasks well.

 

I have used a lot of laptops at work and for personal use. The haswell's I can't even tell the difference between a Sandy Bridge performance wise and a haswell. Meaning I'm not impressed at all.

 

The 4xxxM processors have simply been squeezed out of the market. Anybody who needs performance will go for a 4xxxMQ and anybody who doesn't will be satisfied with a 4xxxU. On top of that, Haswell extended the "U" series up the product stack to include 28W models like the 2.6 Ghz i5-4278U, which largely overlaps with the space that was occupied by "M" processors in previous generations.

Intel has managed to fill each of their traditional market segments with a product targeted specifically at that segment, leaving little room for the traditional Jack of all trades, master of none "M" processors.

 

I think this a wrong move from laptop manufacturers, if I want something for light weight internet usage, I would go for a tablet, and not a laptop.

Laptops now have both disadvantages of laptops and tablets, the size of a laptop, and the processor of a tablet.

Dell have 3 different series under the name Inspiron, the 3xxx, 5xxx and 7xxx, and not singal one of them have an option of a normal processor.

 

Well, this is how the market is going. Most people tend to care about battery life and lightness these days, as the last few generations of CPUs were (are) more than capable of doing what people want. Hell, my X61t with a C2D L7500 can do all I need for classes, let alone my W520's i7-2720QM, for example. Anyway, CPU performance isn't as important these days since we're basically at a plateau as far as CPU demand goes.

There are still laptops around with Haswell -M, -MQ, etc. CPUs that you can buy (and for your wants/needs, you should be getting a workstation with such CPUs). Dell Precision M4800, Lenovo Thinkpad W540p, and HP's ZBook 15 all come to mind.

 

The Intel U-series (15W TDP) processors are the new "normal" processors, though; they have more than ample performance for most conceivable usages and allow thinner and lighter computers.

I should correct your statement regarding tablet processors; the U-series processors aren't designed for tablets; the Y-series processors, Atom and new Core M processors are applicable in tablets.

I can't state it better than Peon did:

The bottom line is that there's almost no point to getting a notebook with the Intel Core 37W TDP dual-cores, hence the near total lack of notebooks available with them. Those processors don't offer enough of a performance advantage over the U-series processors to warrant a larger cooling system and associated design changes. If you want more performance than the U-series offers, the logical choice is the Core i7 quad-core.

 

What software will you be running on your new laptop? If you need more performance than a "U" processor can deliver, the logical course of action would be to get an "MQ" processor as tiller suggested earlier.

Are there special circumstances that need to be taken into account, like a program that's licensed on a per-core basis?

 

I sure hope they decide to offer a quad core ULV CPU. The quad Atom in the Asus Transformer book Laplet are actually quite impressive. Well balanced performance for a 4W TDP and with four full cores (no hyper-threading though). Just do the same with a 15W variant and we're golden.

 

Likely technically impossible without essentially removing the benefit of the function.

It's a bit like this. To drive hyper-threading and internal caching on the processor fast enough to actually outmatch another processor element, you would need the option to go up to fairly high clock-speeds, and have memory working at very high speeds. The moment you reduce the internal clock, and start being economical on the clock-cycles (the principle behind hyper-threading and CISC in general is .. as many single operations as humanly possible, and the higher frequency of single operations, the more real performance increase over simply performing each math-operation when called directly). When you do that, you're essentially adding complexity and circuitry to the die without gaining any performance. Or conversely, removing the dead-weight reduces watt-drain without losing anywhere near proportional performance.

And therefore, the cut-down versions of the current processors are.. cut-down versions. They run without the specific desktop solution for boosting processor performance. And arguably we're not going to see a scaled down low-watt processor with the same functions as the "full versions", until... someone invents liquid nano-threading graphite woven with some electrical conductor, or something of that sort.

 

The power requirement of quad core parts has gradually come down. A 25W quad core part could appear after a couple more iterations of Intel's architecture but it may not run a single-threaded process any faster than a CPU with half the power rating.

The 35W i7-4712MQ is not significantly faster running single threaded benchmarks (Cinebench single or SuperPi) than the 15W i7-4600U.

John

 

Until 2 years ago, it was possible to get a descent budget 35w laptop, with good battery power, my HP sandy bridge 15" used to last 5 hours on 6 cell battery.

Just because some users prefer to sacrifice a little performance for battery time, doesn't mean everyone think that way, and the option should not be taken away all together.

Even today, Macbook pro have a 47w processor in a thin-light form (4870HQ).

With the increase use of SSDs, CPU have became the bottleneck again.

Even if that is their design purpose, currently the MS surface pro tablet (0.36 inches thickness) have those processors:

i5-4300U, i7-4650U

The thing is ...

I get asked by GFX designers and students on recommendation for laptops, I always say Apple is over priced, you can get a slight reduce in features for a much lesser price, but that is not the case any more, if you need performance, in a regular 15" average weight laptop you have to pay high prices, .. and due to Apple's reputation and quality, and the price gap that is getting smaller, it is getting harder to find something worth recommending.

This is a wrong move for "IBM Compatible" laptops.

 

You're looking at this from the wrong perspective - people aren't necessarily preferring to sacrifice a little performance for battery time, that's just a nice side effect - what's really happening is people are preferring to sacrifice a little performance for a laptop that weighs 50% less.

4.46 pounds was considered thin and light back in 2006, but these days you really need to get under 3 pounds to qualify...

In which case you should get a quad core CPU. It's not like the meager 15-20% performance difference between a "U" processor and an "M" processor will make a difference here.

I'm afraid none of us in this thread shares this opinion of yours.

 

You missed the point, it is light enough for 47w cpu, show me others competing in that range of TDP with that weight and thickness

I can't afford the quad core, I want an 'M' processor, with 40% performance increase over the 'U', while being cheaper.

i3-4010U @ 1.70GHz ($281): Passmark: 2482, single thread: 962
i3-4000M @ 2.40GHz ($240): Passmark: 3304, single thread: 1354

4000M scores 33% more, and 40% more on signal thread performance, while unit price is $40 less.

I want a $400 laptop with core i3, that can be upgraded with SSD and RAM, and perform 40% more, and the extra $40 of cpu price difference can be used to cover the extra costs for upgrading the heat sink design to handle the extra heat.

sources, cpubenchmark.net, wikipedia.org

 

Then buy a used business class model of equivalent performance off lease. And have at it. Your kind of laptop is not buyable new at that price point now. Thinner, lighter, and more battery efficient at similar performance to the Sandy era boxes what is desired.

 

I agree with hhhd1 that it is sad that things are going in this direction.

 

Hey man, what happened to the good old days with the 13" thin and lights with standard voltage 35w CPUs, dedicated graphics, and non-soldered, user replaceable standard height 9.5mm drives, like the Asus U36, Sony Vaio S/Z series, Acer TimelineX, LG P330 etc? I felt those struck a balance between portability and performance, because they have decent CPU performance(comparable to today's Haswell ULVs), dedicated graphics and upgradable, non-soldered drives and memory, and were all around 1 inch thick. Normal people who bought a M-series Sandy Bridge and buy a U-series Haswell thinking they'll be much faster because they're new will be disappointed when they feel the same performance level.



Now we have to go to niche/boutique manufacturers who still care about this stuff like Gigabyte.

 

In my world, Gigabyte is a niche maker, but Gaming is their specialty. Business Class from the big brands will be your main solution in non gaming laptop brands. Since corporate PC fleet needs tend to be more oriented to your needs, even in current machines.

 

Yes and no, Lenovo and HP have moved to ULVs for some of their smaller notebooks now too. I haven't looked at Dell Latitudes much, but I'd bet the situation is somewhat similar.

 

Most people don't need the performance you get out of standard-voltage processors. That's why mainstream systems are going ULV. If you want more power there are still plenty of more powerful systems available. Don't expect this to change any time soon.

 

Yup, this is the trend I've been seeing too.. Went to PC World here in the UK and most laptops had ULV processors... I still am not a fan of this but then again, I wouldn't buy any of the laptops sold in their shops..

 

if they move us to ULV cpu we should be getting sub 3lb super quiet or fanless laptops with 15 hour battery life to last us a transcontinental flight. My e7240, e7440, t440s, t440 do none of that. Heat off the bottom can definitely still be felt, fan is audible, battery life is still meager and some can do 10 hrs but it requires 2 batteries. My t420 can get 10 hrs, same or less heat on the bottom, I think it's faster performance, I have lots of option, msata, main drive, modular bay. 2x ram slots non soldered, is a socketed cpu and can be upgraded.

IMO the move to ULV has provided none of the major pros, less heat, quieter, longer battery life, much smaller chassis. Very minimal gains in the depts it was supposed to excel in.

 

I'm surprised this thread is still going on...

 

The problem is that Intel's "Ultra-low" means slightly lower or maybe no lower at all than the standard chips but have a lower maximum speed to match a power ceiling.

Until I got a Toshiba R500 some years ago I had assumed that the ULV chips I had assumed that the ULV chips were actually selected because they used less power. Then I worked that its U7600 CPU used more power than an undervolted T7600 CPU running at the same speed (see the paragraph just above the Heat and Noise heading.

There are some notebooks that combine ULV CPUs with thin notebooks that keep cool and run quietly. Here's one in my collection.

John

 

These cpus are designed for ultrabooks .. there are even faster which are used in "tank" laptops

 

What is wrong with them for many people is bulk. Many people are obsessed by thin, light, and stylish. And unfortunately, you are in the minority. Gamers and content creators major exceptions to the rule.

 

Yup.

This is why this is a retarded move from computer manufacturers ..

This is stating the facts about this, and not my personal opinion.

I would prefer the thinner with more battery if I can, but computer manufacturers are not using them to do so.

- They are using designs for laptops with U processors, that would have been fine with M processor. (the thickness is enough to use a regular heat sink)
- The battery time on idle is quite similar between the M and U, in fact, if you set the M to power saving mode, you might get battery time very similar to M.

So, by using U instead of M, all you 'benefit' is loosing the ability to increase processor clock when needed. .. that is while paying more money.

The only logical use for U processors is if you want to force laptops to stay underclocked all the time, because you cannot create a heat dissipation solution that would handle the extra heat, otherwise this is ridiculous.

 

Lenovo G510 Notebook Review - NotebookCheck.net Reviews
4200M
48WH battery
idle time: 9h 48min

Review Acer Aspire S3-392G Ultrabook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews
4200U
45WH battery
idle time: 9h 55min

The idle time is not accurate measurement of CPU efficiency, because it is affected by other components in the laptop, but this is just to show how 4200U in power saving move is not that much better than 4200M

 

And that's exactly what's going on. The average Ultrabook is about as thick as the latest issue of Vogue or National Geographic. You're simply not getting much of a heat dissipation solution.