What Is Intel Evo? A Recipe for the Most Portable, Longest-Lasting Laptops

Alongside Intel’s announcement of its 11th generation “Tiger Lake” mobile processors, the chip giant today also outlined its Intel Evo initiative. Formerly "Project Athena," Evo sketches out a blueprint for what the company deems the ideal premium laptop, based on extensive research into how users employ their machines and people's big pinch points.

"Evo" is both a marketing rebranding and the evolution of Project Athena, an existing set of guidelines for Intel's partner manufacturers that strive to create thin, long-lasting, efficient laptops. The new name is more consumer-friendly (and theoretically will be seen on stickers that appear on laptops in the future), but the essential goals remain the same. 

Adios, Athena: New Laptops, New Rules

Think of Evo as version 2.0 of Project Athena, with updated features now that the groundwork has been laid. But what exactly are these new guidelines? Generally, the goals are practical battery life for the real world, instant wake from sleep, fast charging, and the presence of modern connectivity. 

More specifically, to qualify as an Evo laptop, the machine will have to meet a host of performance and feature requirements:

• At least nine hours of battery life, assuming a 1080p screen

• Wake from sleep in less than one second

• The ability to recharge the battery, to at least four hours of juice, in under 30 minutes

• Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity

Intel would like Evo-compliant laptops to achieve the performance-related conditions above under typical use environments. That includes heavy use of local and cloud apps, with many web pages opened at once, all while using Wi-Fi and the screen at 250 nits of brightness.

Physical design factors come into Evo, as well. Intel notes that it provides its partners with guidelines for thin-bezel designs to maximize screen area while reducing footprint. (This requirement is expressed as screen-to-body ratio.)

The Evo system guidelines also mandate the use of Intel's upper-end Core i5 and i7 Tiger Lake processors, which employ the company's Iris Xe integrated graphics. The company made some promising performance claims about Iris Xe earlier in the day, claiming it tops AMD's best current Radeon integrated graphics in its Ryzen mobile processors, and can even spar with some late-model GeForce MX dedicated chips in games.

Athena's Legacy Lives On

Laptops have made big strides in the past few years in terms of portability, power, and battery life, though it’s difficult to credit that to Project Athena solely or directly. Whether or not a laptop technically qualified as an Athena-approved laptop became rather nebulous, even for tech reviewers. And it was not something that the bulk of laptop shoppers were all that aware of. The goal was always more of an industry North Star: to make laptops more portable and last longer, after all. 

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That said, the Project Athena guidelines were pushing manufacturers in their design decisions to gain compliance, even if the branding proper wasn’t as visible as expected. Consumers didn’t necessarily have to know the Athena name for it to benefit them. Intel used Project Athena as its internal guide for giving users what they need in real-world use, and that same spirit is evident in the way the team discusses Evo. 

A press briefing we attended was full of discussion about real-life use cases, the varied needs of on-the-go workers, and at-home efficiency in this long period of widespread remote working under the COVID-19 crisis. Intel wants to give customers practical, visible benefits in the form of battery life and power. It’s a good goal, though it is inexorably tied to positive marketing that implies Intel adds value beyond pure performance, an area in which rival AMD has made some serious inroads in 2020 with its latest mobile Ryzen CPUs. 

We’ll have to judge for ourselves the efficacy of the new guidelines in the future, as the first laptops guided by Evo come to market. But those guidelines present little not to like. Check back to PCMag for reviews of these machines as they become available.