The battery life will be doubled on convertible ultrabooks with the sub-10-watt Haswell processors, which is an improvement over a minimum of 17 watts of power consumed by the current Ivy Bridge chips.

"We are going to nearly double the battery life," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of the PC client group, in a separate presentation at IDF.

PC makers have quoted ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge delivering battery life of between six and eight hours, and up to 10 hours in some cases. The new chips could give convertible ultrabooks battery life of more than 12 hours, and perhaps up to 20 hours.

Perlmutter also said Haswell chips can deliver fast performance and can be used in ultrabooks and high-performance PCs, though power consumption on the chip in that case will be higher.

Ultrabooks with the Haswell chip will become available in 2013, though Intel executives did not provide a specific date. Analysts expect ultrabooks with Haswell to become available starting mid-2013.