Intel claims that platforms built around its Haswell microarchitecture – the successor to the today’s Sandy Bridge, scheduled for 2013 – will use one-twentieth the power of today’s stingiest low-power platforms.

“Haswell was designed to enable a 30 per cent reduction in connected standby power over the currently shipping notebooks using our 2nd Generation Core microprocessors,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during his keyote presentation at the Intel Developer Forum. “But we can do more than that. We can do much better than that.”

Haswell will already have one jump on today’s 32nm Sandy Bridge processors, which Intel brands as their 2nd Generation Core processors: Haswell will be manufactured using the same 22nm tri-gate process that will be used in Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge’s follow-on, which is scheduled to appear next year.

Ivy Bridge, however, is a “tick” to Sandy Bridge’s “tock”, to use Intel’s tick-tock parlance: a tick is a process advancement, such as moving from 32nm to 22nm, while a tock is a new microarchitecture. Ivy Bridge is a shrunken Sandy Bridge, while Haswell is a new architecture debuting on the same 22nm process used by Ivy Bridge.

With a new architecture, Haswell can have tools baked into it that can help it fulfill Otellini’s “much better than that” promise.

Otellini told his keynote crowd the Intel has already completed the design of its next-generation microarchitecture, then he launched into a wonderfully jargon-filled explanation of Haswell’s power-saving potential: “We’ve targeted Haswell’s design not just for lower power, but for architecting a system-level power-managemnent framework that’s supported by efficient systems design throughout the ecosystem that has the opportunity to reduce the platform power by a factor of more than 20 over our current designs.”

Then, understandably and rhetorically, he asked: “What does this mean?”

He then answered his own question. “This means that we will be able to enable all-day usage and more than 10 days of always-connected standby capability on a single charge from the power grid,” he said, “and delivers all of this without compromising any of the performance that you have come to expect from today’s mainstream notebooks.”