Intel's Project Athena: What is it, performance, battery life, and more

What's Project Athena?

At its heart, Project Athena is a program to get notebook manufacturers to create more powerful and portable notebooks with long real-world battery life. You can think of it as Ultrabook 2.0.

What’s Ultrabook?

For those too young to know or too old to remember, Ultrabook was a program that Intel introduced in 2011 to promote a new class of thin and light notebooks. To be called an Ultrabook, the notebook had to meet a set of stringent criteria for thinness, weight, and performance. The notebooks that did, enjoyed greater publicity and marketing courtesy of Intel, who poured hundreds of millions into promoting the Ultrabook program. Take a trip down memory by watching this Ultrabook ad.   

So what are these new notebooks called? Project Athena notebooks?

Not exactly. Project Athena is the codename for this program and it won’t appear on notebooks. Instead, notebooks that meet Project Athena’s criteria will earn the right to use branding that says “Engineered for Mobile Performance.” It could come in the form of stickers or packaging graphics.

Some say this is a problem with Project Athena. That, unlike the Ultrabook initiative that had a clear branding, Project Athena doesn’t. “Engineered for Mobile Performance” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue nor is it quite as evocative as plain old Ultrabook. Perhaps it should have been "Ultrabook Max".

What criteria do notebooks have to meet?

There are a couple, but the aim of it all is to ensure that the notebook is a great all-round performer that’s compact and has excellent battery life. Let’s go through each of them now.

1) Battery life

This is a biggie because notebook manufacturers have different standards of measuring battery life ― something I detailed here — which results in a lot of confusion and disappointment for consumers. Intel wants to clean this up by setting strict testing guidelines that notebook manufacturers must adhere to.

To meet Project Athena’s standards, the notebook must offer at least 16 hours of battery life of local video playback and over 9 hours under “real-world performance conditions.” Local video playback must be with the screen brightness set to 150 nits while “real-world performance conditions” state that the screen must be set to 250 nits. Consider that most notebooks’ displays have a maximum brightness of around 300 nits. Not only that, the notebooks must be able to provide up to 4 hours of battery life from a 30-minute charge.

2) Performance

Project Athena notebooks will have at a minimum, a Core i5 processor with 8GB of memory running in dual-channel mode and a 256GB SSD, including Intel Optane memory H10 options. Such a configuration should be more than sufficient for everyday tasks like emails, web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheets.

3) Instant wake-up

Intel wants Project Athena notebooks to be as responsive from sleep as your smartphone. All Project Athena notebooks will be able to wake from sleep (not boot up) in under one second whether it be with the power button, fingerprint scan, face recognition, or if you lift the notebook’s lid.

4) Connectivity

Support for the new Wi-Fi 6 standard (802.11ax) will be mandatory for all Project Athena notebooks along with support for USB-C Thunderbolt 3. This means your Project Athena notebook will be ready for the new wave of Wi-Fi 6 routers as well as any USB-C peripheral.

5) Form Factor

Intel is quite vague on this point and did not give specific weight or thickness targets. Instead, the requirement here is that Project Athena notebooks be “sleek” and “thin” and that they will have “narrow bezels for a more immersive experience.” Displays will be Full-HD (1080p) at the very minimum and will support touch inputs. Finally, backlit keyboards, precision touchpads, and pen support round up the package.

6) AI

AI is all the rage now and Project Athena notebooks will support far-field voice services along with OpenVINO and WinML. This will enable laptops that are powered by Intel’s new 10th generation Core processors to tap into Deep Learning Boost to increase the performance of AI functions by up to 2.5 times.

What notebook are we using?

The notebook we have on hand is the Lenovo Yoga C940. It’s the brand’s flagship ultra-slim 2-in-1 convertible notebook. Here are its key specifications:

• 14-inch Full-HD IPS display
• Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor
• 16GB LPDDR4X memory
• Intel Iris Plus graphics
• 256GB SSD
• 319.3 x 197.4 x 12.2mm
• 1.17kg
• 52Wh battery

The Yoga C940 is powered by Intel’s newest 10th generation Ice Lake processor and it’s paired with a generous amount of memory. It's really thin and light too ― just 12.2mm thick and a feather under 1.2kg. In my hands, it feels svelte and handy. I don’t foresee it being a problem to carry around.

One thing to note, however, is that this unit is a pre-production sample and doesn’t have finalised drivers. As a result, some benchmarks didn’t complete and the results here shouldn’t be regarded as final. Nonetheless, it should give a good idea of the kind of performance and battery life one can get from a Project Athena-class notebook.

Performance

Performance in general productivity workloads was excellent as evidenced by the Yoga C940’s PCMark 10 results. It recorded higher scores than any other thin and light notebook that’s powered by Intel’s older 8th generation Whiskey Lake Core processor.

Intel made bold claims about the integrated graphics processor in its Ice Lake processors and the Yoga C940’s performance here was certainly encouraging. Thanks to its Iris Plus Graphics integrated GPU, the Yoga C940 was nearly twice as fast as the notebooks that were relying on the Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated GPU in Tomb Raider. It even outperformed the Lenovo ThinkBook 13s which uses a discrete GPU in the form of AMD’s Radeon 540X. That said, NVIDIA’s GeForce MX150 still had the upper hand.

But don’t think for one moment that the new G7 Iris Plus graphics will let you play games. Switching over to a modern game (Far Cry 5) showed that there is still a long way to go before Intel’s integrated graphics solutions are truly game-ready. You'll need a beefy discrete GPU if you want to play the newest games at a reasonable resolution with normal graphics settings.

What about Wi-Fi 6? Will my Internet be faster?

Theoretically, yes. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) will support streams with higher bandwidth. So to test, we used a Wi-Fi 6 router ― the recently reviewed ASUS RT-AX88U ― and measured the time it took to transfer a file downstream and upstream from a server device that was connected to the router via Ethernet. We repeated this at various ranges — 2, 5, and 10 metres.

Unsurprisingly, we found the Yoga C940, which is Wi-Fi 6-enabled, to be significantly faster (anywhere from 28% to as much as 90%) than last year’s HP Spectre x360, which only supports Wi-Fi 5.

Find out more about Wi-Fi 6 by reading these guides:

• The newbie’s guide to 802.11ax: The next big wireless standard
• Wi-Fi has been renamed, but is it really easier to understand?

How's battery life?

The Yoga C940 exhibited really good battery life, despite having a relatively small 52Wh battery. Though it falls short of Intel’s 9-hour real-world criteria, bear in mind that our tests were done with the display at full brightness.

With that in mind, a 7 hour and 27 minute showing on the Modern Office workload is actually quite remarkable. I have no doubt that the Yoga C940 will comfortably exceed Intel’s target if we lowered the brightness by a couple of notches (the maximum brightness of the Yoga C940 is rated at 400 nits) to bring it more in line with the 250 nits brightness level that Intel uses for its own battery testing.

Looking at its Portability Index score, we can see that it almost rivals that of the ASUS Vivobook S14 and LG gram 14, two notebooks with huge batteries and designed specifically with long battery lives in mind.

So, what to make of Project Athena?

The goal of Project Athena is to simplify the notebook buying process. It's to ensure that consumers who do buy a Project Athena notebook have one that is perfectly usable for everyday tasks and is, to a certain extent, future-proof.

Judging from what we have seen here, consumers who do buy a Project Athena notebook, especially one that features a newer 10th generation Ice Lake processor, will be getting a notebook that is more than powerful enough for everyday tasks like emails and web-browsing, and even some light gaming. Equally important is that it will have a USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port and that it supports the new Wi-Fi 6 standard, which future-proofs it to some extent.

All things considered, Project Athena is a commendable and welcomed effort from Intel to make it easier for consumers to pick their ideal notebooks. Unfortunately, we are not convinced at this point that the actual branding is powerful enough for consumers. For a start, Project Athena is a codename, so consumers won’t actually see the words “Project Athena” anywhere on a notebook or in a store. Instead, all they’ll see is the early mentioned sticker that simply says “Engineered for Mobile Performance,” which, looks too generic and lacks a clear identity.

Still, these are early days yet and intel could yet tweak their marketing strategy. For now, it’s a step in the right direction to make buying notebooks easier for consumers.

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