Intel formally unveiled its next-generation 10th-generation Ice Lake processors in Taiwan today, but its second announcement at the Computex trade show is arguably more important. Project Athena is a new take on the Ultrabook initiative of 2011, designed to push high-end laptop computers into new levels of performance, battery life and usability – as measured in real world conditions. Project Athena was first announced at CES earlier this year, but now we’re getting the first real details about about how these laptops are graded, how standards will evolve over time and when the first models will be released.
First of all, it’s worth mentioning how Project Athena works. Basically, Intel gives laptop makers a specification to hit and help from its engineers to get there, with the promise of putting their marketing might behind any laptops that make the grade. With Ultrabooks, the industry was able to put a convincing amount of performance into a very slim form factor, allowing Windows laptops to compete against the dominant MacBook Pro models of the era. Project Athena is intended to work similarly, but it has a broader mandate to improve the user experience.
That means that the Project Athena specification is complex. Rather than just requiring laptops of a certain thickness to hit a reasonable battery life target, the standard touches on areas like performance, responsiveness, AI, connectivity, design and security features too. Interestingly, it’s also somewhat platform agnostic, and Intel plans to validate both Windows 10 and Chrome OS devices under the programme.
Intel carries out its testing in a novel way. Rather than judging battery life under ideal conditions – with nothing running in the background, brightness turned way down and a power-saving battery plan engaged – Intel tests laptops as they come from the manufacturer with default settings, the screen set to a healthy 250 nits of brightness, connected to Wi-Fi and all automatically started background apps running. Similarly, performance metrics are run with the machine unplugged from the wall, as Intel says this is when most users care most about responsiveness. If Intel sticks to its guns on this, battery life estimates promulgated by laptop makers could actually start to mean something – and they’ll be incentivised from installing a lot of bloatware too.