JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 15performance indicators, or KPIs.
Intel highlighted the
performance of a (undisclosed)
non-Athena system with an
Athena system just to give a look
at what you might be getting
with its designs. Performance
under battery power isn’t
something reviewers usually
test, but Intel’s convinced it’s
worthwhile anyway.
According to Martyn
Stroeve, Intel’s senior director
of technology marketing,
notebook manufacturers were
optimizing for battery life, and
getting a hypothetical battery
life of, say, about ten hours and twenty
minutes. Intel then worked with them to
increase performance, but shaved off twenty
minutes of battery life as a result.
“It’s still ten hours, but the system was
quicker and more responsive,” Stroeve said.
“And that’s something that we thought it was
worthwhile to share.”
It’s still a somewhat obscure metric, and
Stroeve acknowledged that Intel’s struggling
with how to put that more front and center
with end users. Will it eventually offer some
sort of “Project Athena” badge or sticker?
Stroeve said they’re considering it, though
with no formal commitment to either the
program or what it could be called. The
message Intel’s trying to impart, though, is
The Intel Core i7-powered Surface Laptop 3 is superior to that
powered by the AMD mobile Ryzen 7.that the design work’s being done on Athena
machines, whether you realize it or not.
Intel executives holed up in a hotel near
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit also
reminded reporters about application
compatibility and performance issues
associated with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon
8cx chips (go.pcworld.com/8cxs), which
compete with Intel’s Core chips. But our
own testing had already turned up those issues
in our Microsoft Surface Pro X review (go.
pcworld.com/sprx), and had proven that the
Intel Core i7-powered Surface Laptop 3 (see
page 69) was superior to that powered by the
AMD mobile Ryzen 7 (go.pcworld.com/r7c7),
too. That testing also uncovered significant
differences in the SSD performance, as well.