Intel Evo-spec laptops
ULTRABOOK 2.0: THE MOST COMPELLING PCS YOU CAN BUY RIGHT NOW. FULL GROUP TEST OF THE NEW RANGE.
Intel’s Project Athena was announced back in 2019, as a program to encourage laptop vendors using 10th Gen Intel chips to optimise their devices along a few key lines that the company believed would be most critical to today’s consumers. After a year of extensive uptake across thin-and-light laptops, Intel says it’s learnt a lot from the program already and has expressed these findings in the next generation of Athena: Intel Evo.
What is Evo?
To make the cut, an Intel Evo Laptop needs to offer stable performance throughout its battery life, wake from sleep in less than a second, maintain over nine hours battery life on real-world use benchmarks, and offer four hours of battery life from a 30 minute fast-charge.
The main other standout features you’ll see on all Evo laptops is Wi-Fi 6 compatibility and Thunderbolt 4 interface connections. While the new Wi-Fi spec could reasonably be expected on all new laptops, ensuring a consistent Thunderbolt spec is actually a great way to make the shared USB/Thunderbolt ports a little more predictable for everyday consumers. With multiple generations of both technologies competing through the same USB Type-C connection, knowing exactly what port is installed has become increasingly complicated on today’s laptops.
Intel 11th Gen
In addition to the tweaks you’ll see through the Evo certification process there’s also the obvious underlying requirement of running one of Intel’s 11th generation Ultrabook processors.
The new chips offer 10-14 percent better general computing performance in multithreaded CPU tasks according to our internal testing, and up to 20 percent improvements on work applications according to Intel.
What is even more significant, however, is the generational graphical improvement. Intel is claiming its new Iris Xe integrated graphics processor is twice as fast as Intel’s Iris Plus or UHD Graphics on 10th generation chips. The improvement was a little bigger at 2.23 times the performance on 3D Mark Time Spy averages across the two cohorts, according to our testing – a difference big enough to put light gaming on the agenda.
With playable 30fps+ framerates on titles like The Division 2, Total War Saga: Troy, Metro: Exodus, F1 2020, and Sid Meier’s Civilization VI when using 1080p resolution and Low graphics quality – it’s fair to say that Evo laptops are the first generation to bring proper entry-level gaming to the Ultrabook.
Taken together this is a considerable generational update that gives consumers a number of reasons to upgrade their Ultrabook. It also shows off Intel’s potential for continued dominance in the increasingly competitive Windows 10 Ultrabook market.
While it’s great to see Intel pushing the consumer agenda forward, with so many stipulations on what laptop vendors can do, we wonder – will it be possible for laptops to differentiate themselves from other Evo laptops on the market?
Read on to see what separates the truly great Ultrabooks of 2021 from the rest of the pack.