Intel's Athena Project promises to improve notebook battery life



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Two weeks after introducing its ninth-generation mobile core processors for high-performance laptops, Intel gave us a taste of what to expect from its Athena project design initiative, a concept that, hopefully, the, will have a positive impact on the best gaming laptops to come. Natural successor to its MacBook Air-inspired Ultrabook specification introduced in 2011, the Athena project is less about making laptops thinner and more focused on improving battery life.

To qualify, hardware manufacturers will have to prove that their laptops can support at least nine hours of consecutive use in real conditions. At the moment, many companies are basing their claims on ideal environments, where more demanding tasks such as video streaming, web surfing and, dare it, cease to exist. . Intel hopes to change this approach with its recently detailed validation program, which places laptops to the test of simulated multitasking on a well-lit screen.

Of course, Intel does not leave its partners in the dark to meet this noble expectation. On the contrary, in the coming weeks, three sites of the Athena Open Labs Project have been opened to test and certify devices. Just in time for Computex, the labs will be based in Taiwan, Shanghai and California. As the first batch is scheduled for next year, some Athena project laptops will host Il Lake's 10-nm Intel processors while others will use the company's Y and U series silicon.

One of the ways for these companies to solve the problem of battery life is to abandon the traditional energy-hungry display that, according to Intel's own findings, could consume more than 50% of the life of a laptop battery. Instead, the company recommends its partners to start adopting the LPDT of a watt. Coincidentally, they are manufactured by none other than Intel, in collaboration with Sharp. The idea is to integrate OEMs once the screens are easier to implement.

In addition to offering a better battery life to your next laptop, Intel says the Athena project will bring a "new level of responsiveness" to its co-developed systems. According to intel, this means allowing users to stop and resume tasks without interruption. For example, if you are editing a 4K video and you have to go to a meeting, the laptop resumes from where you left off as soon as you open its shell.

This is possible thanks to a new lock / wake-up solution centered on what it calls "the contactless connection". Third-party technologies such as Tobii and Mirametrix are already an example. In the Microsoft ecosystem, Windows Hello is too. Since the personal computer market is in constant decline, according to some analystsit makes sense for Intel to try to "disrupt" it, so to speak.

The Athena project was presented for the first time at the CES in January. At the 0:58 mark of his initial sizzling coil, we could see someone playing Anthem on a seemingly thin and lightweight laptop, no charging cable in sight. The company has since pointed out that the Athena project laptops were intended for "mobile phone users", for anyone who used it everywhere, including cafes, bars, coworking spaces and trade shows. congress center press.

In vain, I contacted Intel to comment on Athena's role in the gaming notebook market.

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