Intel unveils Project Athena Open Labs, paving the way to better low-power laptops

Today, we have increased competition within the notebook market, with Qualcomm attempting to tacking the ultra-low-power market through Windows 10 on ARM while AMD has started to make headway with their Ryzen Mobile SOCs. 

While Intel remains the dominant player within the laptop market, moving forward the company will need to work to maintain its position, leveraging their technical expertise and their close relationships with OEMs to make their competitors less appealing. 

Building upon their Project Athena announcement at CES, Intel has confirmed their plans to create “Project Athena Open Labs” in Taipei, Shanghai and Folsom, California” to help enable OEMs to create low-power systems that offer compelling performance levels. 

Think of Project Athena as the next step of Intel’s Ultrabook initiative, which ushered in the era of thin and light notebooks. With Athena, Intel plans to increase the performance and responsiveness of existing form factors while enabing manufacturers to create systems with up to 20 hours of battery life.  

With this project, Intel wants to create systems which respond instandly when coming out of sleep states, deliver 5G integrated connectivity and utilise AI technologies to boost mobile productivity. With Athena, Intel will work with OEMs to choose the best components and co-design and certify future products.  

If an OEM comes to Intel with a design, they will assess the devices power draw, recommend product optimisations if they can and approved devices based on Intel’s design requirements.