Friday, August 8, 2014

Peek inside an Apple Macbook Air laptop with the Intel haswell CPU.

This is the Apple Macbook Air 6,2 Haswell ULT Mid 2013 (13 inch) model with 1.3GHz Core i5 CPU. The laptop can easily stay battery powered for 12hours and is a great ultra portable device.
When you order this laptop you are essentially purchasing 4 big LiPo batteries and some electronics inside an aluminum chassis ;)
The laptop is mainly batteries and a little bit of computer :)
This model has a 256GB Sandisk PCIexpress Solid State Drive. The drive is screaming fast > 650MByte/s read write speeds.
802.11ac card with only two channels :(
Heatsink fan assembly. Below the heatsink is the CPU package which consists of the dual-core haswell ULT Core-i5 CPU + GPU die and the south-bridge(15W TDP part). The Intel HD Graphics 5000GPU is quite capable with 40EU GT3 silicon (the same number as the high-end Core i7 quadcore HQ CPU found in the MBPro retinas) The Haswell ULT CPU package supports C-states from C1 to C10. During idle the CPU stays in C7 state. Thus my guess is that the MBAir LCD panel supports (Panel Self Refresh). You can check the CPU C-state by invoking powermetrics in the terminal.
The fan.
The 54WattHr battery specs.
The CPU is a power-miser :). It idles at 800MHz and the GPU idles at 350MHz. The power consumption of the package at idle is ~1W. (Compare that to 4W of a Macbook Pro retina 15" of this same generation)

here is the snippet from the output of 'powermetrics'

**** Processor usage ****

Intel energy model derived package power (CPUs+GT+SA): 0.62W

LLC flushed residency: 90.5%

System Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 91.58% (1190.51 Mhz)

Package 0 C-state residency: 91.42% (C2: 9.49% C3: 0.03% C6: 0.00% C7: 81.91% C8: 0.00% C9: 0.00% C10: 0.00% )

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The same snippet from a non-ULT HQ CPU MBPr 15".
**** Processor usage ****

Intel energy model derived package power (CPUs+GT+SA): 4.42W

LLC flushed residency: 72.5%

System Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 76.73% (2148.35 Mhz)

Package 0 C-state residency: 74.03% (C2: 17.04% C3: 1.80% C6: 55.19% C7: 0.00% )