It is often hard to trust what manufacturers say about their product's battery life. Usually, the hype is created to boost sales. Before, when a company claims their laptop can last up to six hours, the actual performance is lower than that - the common reason is that battery life depends on a case to case basis and on what the user is trying to execute. Haswell changed all of that.

Laptops with higher resolutions supposedly eat more battery. Users running more applications and playing games should expect fewer hours of battery life. After quite some time of research and product testing, Intel came up with a processor chip that can actually deliver longer battery hours - and it is true for just about every laptop the chip runs on.

Intel's Haswell is the dramatic result of many years of effort and the company's perspective of what future computing should be. For majority of their business, Intel always focused on optimizing processors to be fast. Every Intel chip released is faster than the other. However, there is a limit to how chips can go fast without sacrificing other aspects like power.

The more a chip becomes faster, the more tasks or functions they can carry out. Faster chips offered better audio, games, video, photo and even web servers. The unending demands for computers to be better than their predecessors also placed pressure on chip makers. How can they compact these utilities while still allowing users to make the most out of their devices?

There is one answer: longer battery life.

Computers and laptops suffered a drought when people started paying more attention to tablets, smartphones, music players and cameras. While these devices do not offer exceptional computing capacity, they are thin, slim and portable. People can take them anywhere thus their selling point. Just like any tech device, the fad fades. Eventually, people will come looking for what they need. Intel's ability to extend battery life on better laptops and ultrabooks brought back the value of such devices.

While Intel seemed to bag everything already, not many people know that there is a rival chipmaker. It is not as big as Intel but its market share is far greater than the tech giant. It is not Samsung, Google or Apple, it was ARM.

ARM is a British firm and possibly one of the most vital companies tech users can ever hear of. ARM manufacturers nearly every processor chip for very tech innovation for the last ten years. From iPod to Kindle, iPad, digital cameras and smartphones, ARM is behind such devices. The company is also one of the primary reasons Intel created Haswell. For many years, when a laptop or phone functions throughout the day without charging, it most likely runs on ARM.

Most consumers have not heard ARM because the company does not stamp their brand on the products they run. However, having almost 95% market share of smartphones without brand stamping should say a lot about their product and performance. The release of Haswell along with Intel's venture to mobile chips is now rattling ARM Holdings. Investors are wondering whether Intel is really much closer to challenging ARM and their market dominance. The pending release of Intel's next mobile chips should spell the difference.