Chip giant will talk about a new series of mainstream chips next week that are much more power efficient than today’s processors.

Intel will disclose a new series of ultra-power-efficient chips aimed at tablets and convertibles at the Intel Developer Forum next week.

The Intel 4th Generation Core chips, codenamed “Haswell,” will come close to cutting the power consumption in half compared with the most power-efficient mainstream 3rd Generation Core “Ivy Bridge chips” today.

Ivy Bridge chips used lately in the skinniest, lightest laptops just like the MacBook Air and Hewlett-Packard’s Envy Spectre XT are rated at 17 watts.

The new chips, due in the second half of 2013, will be rated initially at 10 watts — that will slash power consumption by about 41 percent. Later chips will be even more power efficient.

Typically, the decrease the wattage, the skinnyner the product can turn into. for example, capsules these days built round chips based on the ARM design will also be as skinny as 0.3 inches and weigh less than a pound. the ability intake on ARM chips is in most cases rated at below 2 watts.

While mainstream Intel “x86” chips cannot achieve that level of power efficiency, they are considerably more powerful than ARM processors.

And that’s some of the purposes that Microsoft chose to come out with version of its floor tablet. the first surface products will run an RT model of home windows eight designed for energy-environment friendly ARM chips. Later floor merchandise may have more robust Intel Ivy Bridge processors that run the entire home windows 8 pro version.

Intel continues to offer its Atom series of processors that are rated as low as 2 watts, but they haven’t been popular as Intel had hoped because of performance issues when running the full desktop versions of Windows.