Laptops with longer battery life designed to last all-day use will soon be out following the shipment by Intel to Chinese manufacturers of the Haswell chip. The chip is the first Intel Core chip designed for low power consumption.

Intel is expected to announce the delivery of the Haswell chip at a Beijing conference next week. The chip, said Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini, is the single largest generation-to-generation battery life improvement in the company's history.

With a mid-year roll out, the fourth-generation Haswell chip is expected to be found in several ultrabooks, laptops and tablets powered by Haswell processors.

The chips will come in BGA packages with the suffix "R" to distinguish them from socket 1150 CPUs. Intel said the desktop CPUs with the Haswell processors will soon be available in LGA1150 package, compatible with socket 1150.

Intel pointed out that the "R" series BGA chips have different feature-set from other Haswell desktop microprocessors since the parts integrate HD 5200 graphics, supposed to be twice faster than the HD4600 GPU on LGA1150 CPUs.

Its graphic core is as high as 1.3 GHz on the i5-5670R and i7-4770OR, and it is up to 1.15 GHz on the i5-457OR SKUs.

However, Intel's move could be a little bit too late since manufacturers of other low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets had shifted to more battery-friendly ARM processors produced by Intel's competitor. There are also some laptops that now sport the ARM chips.

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