The DDR3L standard offers close to 15 percent power reduction compared to standard DDR3, according to the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) standards-setting organization.

The low-power enhancements come as Intel pushes a new category of thin-and-light laptops called ultrabooks. PC shipments have slowed down this year partly due to tablets and with ultrabooks, Intel hopes to bring tablet features such as touchscreens, instant boot capabilities and always-on connectivity to Ivy Bridge laptops.

In trying to press home Intel's focus on power savings, CEO Paul Otellini looked at power savings with the Haswell microarchitecture, which is Ivy Bridge's successor and will reach laptops in 2013.

"Haswell was designed to enable a 30 percent power reduction in the connected standby power over the currently shipping notebooks," Otellini said. He also said a new "system-level power management framework" on Haswell will produce a 20-fold power reduction in microprocessors, which could enable all-day laptop use and 10 days of always-connected standby on a single battery charge.

But users will also see significant power and performance enhancements with Ivy Bridge, which will consume up to half the power at the same performance as current Sandy Bridge chips, said Intel's senior fellow Tom Piazza. Piazza said Ivy Bridge could alternately deliver double the performance on the same power consumption as Sandy Bridge chips, depending on how the chip is used.