84 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019FEATURE INSIDE PROJECT ATHENA
to focus, the second is the ability to adapt to
people’s changing needs and roles as they
move throughout the day. And then the third
thing is that laptop has to be always ready.
No matter where they are, the laptop’s got
to be ready to go before they are. There’s no
more waiting.”
We’re habituated to think of notebook
PCs in terms of price and performance, with
battery life emerging as an important third
consideration. But Newman said that Intel
and its partners see Athena devices evolving
across as many as six different vectors:
Instant Action: An Athena laptop must
transition from a sleep to a wake state
immediately. “When you open the lid or giveit a voice command, it’s
got to respond [from the
user’s perspective]
instantaneously,” Newman
said. “The good thing is
that...you can have the
confidence that you can
open the lid, get the task
done, and then close it.
That will actually get you
to close your lid, and
conserve battery life.”
Performance/
responsiveness: Intel’s
traditional wheelhouse.
But Newman said that
Intel isn’t thinking about
how fast the CPU
accomplishes a single task, but how
responsive the laptop is with multiple files and
applications open simultaneously. The goal is
to “get rid of the spinning circle” in Windows,
and the “beach ball” within Macs.
AI: The goal here, Newman explained, is
less about digital assistants than for your
laptop to intelligently help you focus, by
quietly opening up other, related files when
you’ve selected a spreadsheet, for example,
or filtering out external distractions. Though
Newman didn’t specifically identify Microsoft
here, these tasks sound very much like what
that company is trying to accomplish with
features like Timeline (go.pcworld.com/
wntm), Microsoft Search (go.pcworld.com/The ability to focus isn’t just a Project Athena watchword. “Focus” was
one of the key messages that Microsoft chief product officer Panos
Panay emphasized during the October launch of the Surface Pro 6 and
Surface Laptop 2.