Presumably in response to a glut of AMD-related news, Intel has preempted its formal Haswell unveil to announce that its chips will draw “50% less power” than Ivy Bridge on “active” workloads, such as playing a game or watching a movie. This is a dramatic turnaround, considering the latest leaks and rumors had suggested that Haswell was struggling to reach its TDP targets.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Intel also put a figure on its efforts to cut idle power consumption, which is one of key areas that was targeted by the architectural changes between Ivy Bridge and Haswell. According to Intel, Haswell’s idle power consumption is 20 times less than Ivy Bridge. “This means that the fourth-generation Core-based products will provide the biggest battery life increase in Intel’s history,” the general manager of Intel’s architecture group, Rani Borkar, told reporters yesterday.

Borkar went on to say that the lowest-power Haswell chips, which are probably destined for expensive tablets (such as the Surface Pro’s successor), have a TDP as low as 7W, down from 10W for the most conscientious Ivy Bridge parts. Perhaps betraying her Indian heritage, Borkar said that the new Haswell chips would power devices that have enough battery life to watch three Bollywood-length movies. It goes without saying, but these power savings don’t come at the expense of performance: Depending on the form factor, Haswell should be the same as, or faster than Ivy Bridge.

While these figures sound rather awesome, they should obviously be taken with a pinch of marketing salt. Haswell’s formal unveil, along with third-party benchmarks and a close examination of the magic occurring under the hood, is expected to occur at Computex in June. It’s also worth noting that nothing was said about Haswell’s GPU, which presumably plays quite a big part in that 50% power reduction while playing games or watching a movie. (See: Intel unveils Haswell’s graphics: Iris branding and improved performance per watt.)

From what we do know already, from leaked slides and IDF briefings, a lot of these power savings stem from the fact that this is a tock in Intel’s tick-tock manufacturing model. Whereas Ivy Bridge used the same architecture as Sandy Bridge, but shrunk to 22nm, Haswell is an entirely new architecture that’s designed from the ground up to make use of Intel’s 22nm FinFET transistors. We also know that a significant focus of the Haswell architecture is improved power gating, lower-power modes, and getting into low-power modes quickly. Way back at IDF 2011, Intel also stated that it will also help manufacturers choose the right components to reduce overall system power, which is generally a much larger hog than the CPU, too.

All told, we expect Haswell to be a beast of a chip. It probably won’t make huge waves on the top end (expect a 10% improvement over Ivy Bridge), but it really does look like Haswell will be incredibly power efficient. Whether this is the chip that boots ARM out of the tablet space, or whether that’ll be Bay Trail or Broadwell (Haswell’s 14nm successor), remains to be seen.

Now read: Intel’s Haswell is an unprecedented threat to Nvidia, AMD