How Intel & PC Makers Are Creating The Ultra-Responsive Laptops Of Tomorrow

Notebooks and Chromebooks are poised to take advantage of the project Athena Spec, which will guide premium laptop designs from top pc makers (and Google!) over the next few years.

- Mark Hachman 

A little 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 unveiled at CES.

Intel executives say they have the support of partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Google, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sharp. Yes, Google. You’ll eventually see “Athena”-specced 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. Unfortunately, they were not at CES.

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’s adopting a collaborative approach that breaks from the original ultrabook.

Remember, Intel originally launched (go.pcworld.com/ ulun) 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,”