Intel officially presents one of its most complete projects in order to improve the environment and ecosystem of current laptops by presenting what they have called Intel Project Athena. The said project will base Open Labs in three different centers – Taipei, Shanghai, and Folsom (California). The company plans to operate in June of this year and will finish their study at some point in 2020.
Intel takes the portable sector seriously
It is well known that Intel has as a second stronghold of the market to portable PCs. In contrast to that AMD has almost made no dent and where this picture can start to change with the new APU Ryzen 3000 and perhaps with the inclusion of some Matisse CPU in a notebook.
Therefore, it seems that Intel wants to move the tab quickly. Josh Newman, Vice President of Intel and general manager of PC innovation Segments, said, “Project Athena Open Labs are a critical step in enabling more extensive, day-to-day collaboration with the components ecosystem to continuously raise the bar for innovation across the platform.”
What does this mean? Their PC Ecosystem wants to accelerate the development and create greater efficiency in the process of selection of components for their OEM clients. It will allow a continuous cycle of adjustments and tests based on real workloads and usage models.
It could also facilitate the work of beta testers and offer components and configurations already optimized so that their clients only have to design their products based on specifications closed in advance.
This logically is very interesting for its customers. It will bring a better optimization and efficiency to the products that come out in 2020. At the same time, cut time that could be used in other areas of R&D within each company.
The Open Labs will focus precisely on that: an innovative approach based on the research of how we use their devices. The social scientists will play a very important role and where they will be a key piece of union with engineers.
The intention of Intel is to optimize and be efficient. Each component provides user experience, such as the battery, the power of the processor or the quality of the screen. If it is possible to improve in each section, the user experience will be more satisfactory and therefore better laptops will be created.
Open Labs will work with independent hardware providers (IHV), where they will have the opportunity to send pieces for a compliance evaluation. In addition, OEMs can also nominate other component suppliers for their participation in the project.
Each of the three confirmed laboratories will have a series of experienced engineers who will test, adjust and make recommendations to improve the capabilities of the devices, such as power, performance, audio, screen, SSD and more. After the evaluation, a list of optimized components will be made available to the OEMs for consideration during the product development cycles. In a few weeks, they will be able to start sending components to these Intel laboratories.
