The new Intel Evo sticker you’ll see on laptops this fall is Intel’s reply to the query, “So what this makes this laptop PC so special, anyway?”
Ever since Intel launched its Project Athena premium thin-and-light PC program eighteen months in the past, Intel and its companions have struggled to speak what makes their collaboratively designed notebooks higher than the remainder. Evo is its new sign. In what Intel is informally calling the “Project Athena Second Edition,” Intel instructed PCWorld how it’s prioritizing its new Intel Evo model as a badge to determine these premium ultrabooks, whereas redefining what they stand for: cloud- and browser-based work.
Intel is launching the brand new Evo model Wednesday alongside the formal, closing unveiling of its 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors. The second version of the Project Athena platform requires a minimal specification of both an 11th-gen Intel Core i5/i7 with Iris Xe graphics, alongside a 12- to 15-inch Full HD (or higher) show, a chassis 15mm or thinner, and Intel’s Dynamic Tuning know-how.
Intel Evo badges will accompany 4 new thin-and-light laptops at launch, with extra to return: the just-announced Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Asus Zenbook Flip S, the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex 5G, and the most recent model of the Acer Swift 5. (Will there be an precise sticker? We don’t know for sure, however the Engineered for Mobile Performance “visual identifier” used for Athena notebooks was only for in-store shows.)
In all, twenty Evo designs are anticipated by the top of the 12 months, Intel executives mentioned. Intel Evo stickers will seem on laptops from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, as earlier than. But as Intel promised, there will likely be new additions for 2020: Dynabook, LG, and MSI. Does the latter signify that we’ll see an Intel Evo gaming PC? Intel isn’t saying.
What’s inside an Evo PC?
The basic premise of what Intel is making an attempt to perform with Project Athena, or Evo, hasn’t modified: work with PC makers to co-design laptops which can be fast to reply, at all times linked, and may final all day on a single cost. Over fifty first-generation “Athena” PCs shipped from Intel’s companions. But the “Athena” designation was by no means actually loudly trumpeted, generally showing on a spec sheet and little extra. The new Evo model might assist change that.
Intel has promised important features in clock velocity for its 11th-gen Tiger Lake chip, together with delivering what it calls the “best ultraportable gaming experience,” together with a doubling of gaming efficiency over the 10th-gen Ice Lake processor. But productiveness nonetheless appears to be the main focus for the Athena platform and Evo badge: Intel guarantees 20 p.c extra efficiency in workplace purposes than competing platforms, that means AMD’s Ryzen.
“Evo will be the key focus for the rest of this year and into next year,” mentioned Josh Newman, vp and normal supervisor of PC Innovation Segments in Intel’s Client Computing Group, in an interview. “These will be the best laptops for getting things done.”
With applications working within the cloud, moderately than out of your native storage, your method of working and even your system necessities change. “It helped us understand, what are the real workflows?” Newman continued. “What are the actual workloads? What is the efficiency impression of getting 100 browser tabs open? All of these items assist us to tell what experiences we have to design for, and in the end what experiences we have to take a look at and confirm for,” he added.
In a presentation Intel made to PCWorld, these experiences included various linked apps and web sites: the Chrome browser, interacting with wealthy media…