FEBRUARY 2019 PCWorld 87common features and design goals for 2019
Athena hardware, which Intel will likely begin
sharing at CES.
First, all Athena hardware will weigh less
than three pounds, though that doesn’t
sound like it’s etched in stone. Newman said
that Intel and its partners are more
concerned about the right mix of battery life
rather than anything else. Intel also hasn’t
released any guidelines for an Athena PC’s
physical dimensions. Some (not all) of the
Athena hardware will also use Intel’s Ice Lake
mobile processors.
Battery life is also expected to improve
from year to year across all of the Athena
designs. But the final battery life target hasn’t
been set, as Newman said that the Athena
engineers are still determining the proper
mix of foreground and background tasks and
workloads, “real-world” screen brightness of
250 to 300 nits, and other factors. That work
will be completed in the next month or so,
he said.
That may mean that Athena hardware
ships with a rated battery life of 20 hours and
more in terms of video playback, as PCWorld
tests. “But what we’re really focused on is
what is the right metric for what users do in
their typical configurations, which is really
new,” Newman said.
All Athena hardware will include USB-C
charging, including fast charging. It appears,
fortunately, that the days of proprietary PC
chargers will slowly fade away over time. In
terms of connectivity, every Athena laptop will
have at least one Thunderbolt 3 port, and
Gigabit Wi-Fi. Some devices will include 4G
LTE as well.
In certain cases, Newman said that Intel is
working with PC makers to enable simple
phone-tethering
solutions. That
may go beyond
just connectivity,
as Newman
highlighted
built-in Windows
apps like Windows
10’s own Your
Phone app (go.
pcworld.com/
w10a) or Dell
Mobile Connect
(go.pcworld.com/Incredibly thin designs like the new Acer Swift 7 (2019; go.pcworld.com/asw7)
may not be Athena-certified if they don’t meet the minimum battery life goals.
But USB-C and Thunderbolt look to be part of the PC platform for years to come.