Look forward to laptops that last 24 hours on a single battery charge, or more than 10 days on connected standby, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) said at its Intel Developer Forum earlier this week.

The chip maker was referring to its next-generation Haswell processor, which is supposed to use 20 times less power compared to existing Intel chips when in idle mode.

While generally being slow to cut power consumption, Intel has devoted substantial resources to developing its low-power Atom architecture and increasing power efficiency with every new processor family.

Haswell will complete the PC "revolution," says Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel's PC client group. Don't expect Haswell for the holiday season this year however, what with Ivy Bridge already scheduled to precede it.

Intel is currently shipping chips based on Sandy Bridge, which launched in Q1 this year.

The power enhancements in Haswell will put it in the same league as ARM's designs, observed GigaOM. Of course, given that Haswell is scheduled to make an appearance only in 2013, detractors argue that competitors such as Nvidia and other ARM licensees will have advanced even further in the intervening time.

With Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) decision to make Windows 8 available on ARM processors though, it is clear that even if Intel fails to deliver, the era of 24-hour computing is likely to arrive very soon.

For more:
- check out this article at PCWorld
- check out this article at ZDNet
- check out this article at GigaOM

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