86 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019FEATURE INSIDE PROJECT ATHENA
Connectivity: Intel and its partners
continue to plan for “simple, automatic, secure
connections,” Newman said: Gigabit Wi-Fi
(go.pcworld.com/wsky) and Wi-Fi 6, with 4G
LTE transitioning to 5G over the long term.
Form factor: Intel and its partners don’t
plan on radically redesigning the PC with
much beyond the 2-in-1 and clamshell
designs already on the market, Newman
said. Nor do they envision making Athena
notebooks any thinner than today’s thin-and-
light PCs. But they do imagine that the
footprint will shrink, trimming bezels so that
a laptop’s base may shrink without reducingscreen size, for example. The keys here are
minimizing weight and also, somewhat
oddly, skin temperature. Clearly, “laptops”
are still in vogue.
In the future, though, the sky’s the limit.
Newman specifically mentioned that dual-
display devices like its own ”Tiger Rapids”
prototype (go.pcworld.com/tigr) or the
Asus Project Precog (go.pcworld.com/
prcg), as well as devices with foldable
displays, may be featured in future iterations
of Athena hardware.EARLY PROJECT ATHENA
SPECS FOR 2019
As part of the Innovation Excellence Program
(go.pcworld.com/spfl) that helped deliver
the HP Spectre Folio, Intel will assist its
partners with whitepapers, reference designs,
technical documents, and other IP, Newman
said. While Intel expects that the “Athena”
designs will begin as premium products,
Newman said Intel hopes that they’ll diffuse
outward to more mainstream products from
more “white box” PC makers.
“We expect that, over time, not just to hit
our north star of Project Athena designs, but
also improving the experience of all laptops in
the market, which is very similar to the
experience we observed with the ultrabook,”
Newman said.
While we don’t know what the first Athena
devices will look like, or what they’ll be
called, Newman revealed some of theDual-screen displays like the Asus Project Precog
remain in the prototype stage for now. But who
knows what the future holds?