Inside Project Athena
How Intel and PC makers are creating the ultra-responsive laptops of tomorrow. MARK HACHMAN reports
Alittle less than eight years ago Intel helped usher in the era of thin-and-light notebook PCs, then called ultrabooks. Now, Intel and a number of its partners are ready to take the ultrabook to the next level with ‘Project Athena’, in a multi-year roadmap they’re unveiling here at CES.
Intel executives say the have the support of partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Google, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung and Sharp. Yes, Google. You’ll eventually see ‘Athena’-specified Chromebooks, too.
What Project Athena notebooks will eventually be branded as hasn’t been formally decided yet, but the timetable has; the first Project Athena laptops will ship in the second half of 2019.
Ultrabooks debuted in 2011, arguably as a response to the incredibly slim Macbook Air that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was then pulling out of manila envelopes. But don’t think that Project Athena will go even thinner. According to Josh Newman, the general manager of mobile innovation segments for Intel, Athena’s goal is for PC makers to deliver improved performance and battery life (20 hours) in what he called an already ‘thin enough’ form factor.
Platform first, not Intel Inside
Project Athena hardware is currently exclusive to Intel’s processors. But with Athena, Intel is adopting a collaborative approach that breaks from the original ultrabook. Remember, Intel originally launched an ultra-low voltage version of the 2nd-gen Intel Core processors, then the ultrabook platform. And yes, some of the first Athena notebooks debuting in 2019 will be based on ‘Ice Lake’, the 10nm architecture that Intel formally revealed at CES. (Thunderbolt 3, Wi-Fi 6, and Gen 11 graphics will all make an appearance.) Ice Lake is based on the Sunny Cove architecture, Newman confirmed, expected to bring with it significant performance improvements.
But Project Athena isn’t specifically designed for Ice Lake. Instead, it’s built for the ongoing generations of Intel low-power U- and Y-series processors. They are being designed into specific PC platforms through
partnerships with Intel engineers and members of the PC design teams. And if that sounds familiar, it should: the HP Spectre Folio was also engineered collaboratively, and you’ll see the same partnerships extended to other premium designs across the industry. There’s even a ‘Project Athena’ certification process, though that will eventually adopt a more formal brand name.
Here’s what Project Athena will do for you
Intel and its partners already have a plan in place for Athena devices, along with some early numbers and specs to guide their development. One example:
the company has ruled out laptops 9mm and thinner, since they don’t offer the volume to include a sizeable battery. Laptop designs with fans can be 15mm thick, and so on. But the goals of Project Athena are much more holistic in nature.
“It accomplishes three things, three key experiences that we can deliver on the laptop,” Newman said of Project Athena’s overarching mission. “One is a better ability to focus, the second is the ability to adapt
to people’s changing needs and roles as they move throughout the day. And then the third thing is that laptop has to be always ready. No matter where they are, the laptop’s got to be ready to go before they are. There’s no more waiting.”
We’re habituated to think of notebook PCs in terms of price and performance, with battery life emerging as an important third consideration. But Newman revealed that Intel and its partners see Athena devices evolving across as many as six different vectors:
Instant Action: An Athena laptop must transition from a sleep to a wake state immediately. “When you open the lid or give it a voice command, it’s got to respond [from the user’s perspective] instantaneously,” Newman said. “The good thing is that... you can have the confidence that you can open the lid, get the task done and then close it. That will actually get you to close your lid, and conserve battery life.”
Performance/responsiveness: Intel’s traditional wheelhouse. But Newman explained that the firm isn’t thinking about how fast the CPU accomplishes a single task, but how responsive the laptop is with multiple files and applications open simultaneously. He said that the goal is to “get rid of the spinning circle” in Windows, and the “beach ball” within Macs.
AI: The goal here, Newman revealed, is less about digital assistants than for your laptop to intelligently help you focus, by quietly opening up other, related files when you’ve selected a spreadsheet, for example,
or filtering out external distractions. Though Newman didn’t specifically identify Microsoft here, these tasks sound very much what that company is trying to accomplish with features like Timeline, Microsoft Search, and Focus Assist that have been quietly added to Windows and Office over time.
Battery life: Newman didn’t mention Qualcomm once, but Intel has to have Qualcomm and its power-sipping Snapdragon 8cx chip in its mirrors. Again, though, this isn’t just about minimizing CPU power. “It’s about bestknown configurations, working with the ecosystem on the lowest-power components, putting these together in the best recipes to maximize battery life in real-world user scenarios,” Newman added.
Expect to see more emphasis on Intel’s collaborative work in 1W display panels, he said, along with undisclosed improvements in battery technology. All of these low-power components, put together, will combine to form the “recipes” he is describing.
One metric that Qualcomm and Intel may end up adjusting is exactly how battery life is measured. No user’s computing experience is exactly alike, and a day of using a notebook at a university or at a sales conference is much different than editing video back at your desk. Video rundown tests, though simple and effective, may be replaced with something else.
Connectivity: Intel and its partners continue to plan for “simple, automatic, secure connections”, Newman explained: Gigabit Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi 6, with 4G LTE transitioning to 5G over the long term.
Form factor: Intel and its partners don’t plan on radically redesigning the PC with much beyond the 2-in-1 and clamshell designs already on the market, Newman said. Nor do they envision making Athena notebooks any thinner than today’s thin-and-light PCs. But they do imagine that the footprint will shrink, trimming bezels so that a laptop’s base may shrink without reducing screen size, for example. The keys here are minimizing weight and also, somewhat oddly, skin temperature. Clearly, ‘laptops’ are still in vogue.
In the future, though, the sky’s the limit. Newman specifically mentioned that dual-display devices like its own ‘Tiger Rapids’ prototype or the Asus Project Precog, as well as devices with foldable displays, may be featured in future iterations of Athena hardware.