Peek into changing world
ROYCE WILSON
LAPTOPS are great — they pack most of the features of a desktop PC into something you can carry around with you and have totally changed the way we work, game and live our lives.
They’ve come a long way from their earliest iterations, but even now limited battery life and average performance (compared to a desktop PC) are still issues for many users — something chipset manufacturer Intel and its laptopmaking partners are hoping to change.
Intel has had its Project Athena program in the works for some time, but finally lifted the lid on some of the specifics to journalists at the recent IFA 2019 trade show in Berlin — and the impacts on laptops are going to be significant.
Project Athena is being developed with several of Intel’s laptop-making partners (including Acer, Asus, Dell and Lenovo, among others) and is designed to harness the power of Intel’s 10thgeneration processors and offer consumers a next-level experience.
One of the big areas of improvement is what Intel is calling “All-day Battery Life” — more than nine hours of real-world use (such as surfing the web, watching YouTube, streaming movies, using social media and word processing), and anything from 16-22 hours of video playback.
Accompanying this is a quick charge/top-up capability, whereby 30 minutes plugged into the AC adaptor will provide four hours of battery life.
Project Athena-certified laptops will also include Wi-fi 6, being hailed as “the biggest in Wi-fi in a decade”, which will allow 6 gigabitplus connection speeds — multiple times faster than the Wi-fi in most current laptops.
From a gaming perspective, anything meeting the Project Athena certification will be able to run games in 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second — so not ultra HD, but certainly more than adequate for most people.
Another feature likely to appeal is Ai-powered upscaling, allowing low-resolution video to be converted to higher resolution.
Other innovations coming as part of the project include instant-on accessibility and mobile phone-like “alwayson” connectivity, allowing users to still receive messages and notifications even when their laptop is in standby or sleep mode.
Intel corporate vice-president Chris Walker said the project was ambitious and had come about from the company’s own research as well as working closely with its partner laptop manufacturers.
Senior principal engineer Melissa Gregg said Project Athena was borne out of a desire to design laptops for modern users, particularly highly mobile and ambitious creative types.
“There’s a new kind of user that these devices are inspired by — people who are independent, ambitious, on the make; they’re go-getters,” she said.
Ms Gregg said that while a lot of people liked to have somewhere they could go to be focused, there was an evergrowing class of people who needed access to versatility and reliability.
“That mobile dimension for the mobile go-getter is about, ‘physically, I am moving around the world; there are certain things I want to not worry about’,” she said.
Some of what I saw was very promising indeed — including the Asus Proart Studiobook One (possibly the world’s most powerful laptop), the Asus Zenbook Duo dual-screen laptop, the Acer Predator Triton 500 gaming laptop and the Lenovo Yoga C940 multi-purpose laptop with a screen that completely folds over behind the keyboard if needed.
If Project Athena continues to come together the way it has started, we may very well be looking at a generational change in laptop functionality — all positive things for end users, regardless of whether they’re creating videos, editing photos, playing games or just typing reports.
Royce Wilson attended IFA 2019 as a guest of Intel.