Intel shows logo for Project Athena laptops

Intel has shown the ‘visual indicator’ for laptops certified under Project Athena, Intel’s program that identifies laptops with, among other things, a battery life of more than nine hours. The first Athena laptop will be released in the US on Thursday.

The visual indicator is an Intel logo with ‘Engineered for mobile performance’ below it, according to the message from Intel. The logo will not appear on the housing of a laptop, but it can appear on, for example, the box, on promotional material in a store and on product pages on websites.

That should happen from Thursday, because Dell has released the first laptop in the US that has been approved in the program. It is the XPS 13 2-in-1 with Intel Ice Lake processor. The laptop is not yet for sale in the Benelux. Some models of the HP Elitebook will follow shortly. This fall, laptops from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo should also follow with the Athena approval.

Intel sees the Athena certification as a successor to the Ultrabook program from a few years ago. In addition to boasting nine hours of battery life in mixed use, laptops should last for 16 hours when watching local videos. In addition, the laptops must support fast charging via USB-C, so that users can continue for four hours after a half hour of charging.

In addition, laptops need to be able to wake up from sleep in under a second and continue to receive notifications during that sleep thanks to a Lucid Sleep mode, which maintains the connection to the modem. WiFi 6 is mandatory, a mobile connection via 4g or 5g is optional.

In terms of hardware, an Athena laptop must at least run an eighth-generation Core i5, in combination with at least 8GB of dual-channel memory and an NVME SSD of at least 256GB. Laptops must also support Thunderbolt 3. A touchscreen and microphones that enable voice recognition from far away are also mandatory.