Project Athena is a new initiative by Intel to make laptops which actually lives up to the expectations of consumers in terms of speed, responsiveness and battery life, promising 9 hours of real-world battery life, and resume from standby in less than a second.
Today NotebookItalia published a hands-on with one of the first Project Athena laptops, the Acer Swift 5 14 (2019) at Computex 2019.
Intel claims the laptop will be the lightest with a dedicated graphics card, and will feature a magnesium-lithium alloy and magnesium-aluminium frame in the wrist area, and will be more compact, both in width and thickness and weigh less than 1 kg.
It will have a 14.1 inch IPS Full HD panel (1920 x 1080 pixels) screen with ultra-thin frame.
It will be powered by an Intel Ice Lake 10 nm Core processor and should have 16 GB of RAM and 512GB of storage on PCIe NVMe SSDs , with optional 4G-LTE / 5G and Intel Optane, in addition to the backlit keyboard and Precision touchpad. Graphics will either be powered by the Intel UHD Gen11 component or the dedicated graphics Nvidia GeForce MX250 in some models.
Connectivity is via the Gig + WiFi 6 (802.11ax) wireless connectivity. Also present is a Windows Hello fingerprint reader, a USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 1 port (capable of transfers up to 5 Gbps and equipped with a display and power supply) that could be replaced by a Thunderbolt 3 in the definitive model, two USB 3.0 (one with USB device charging off) and HDMI port.
The Acer Swift 5 14 (2019) will like hit shelves in fall 2019, depending on the availability of Intel Ice Lake processors and should be priced in line with other medium high-end models.
Other Project Athena laptops expected this year include the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 , HP Envy 13 Wood , and Lenovo Yoga S940.
See NotebookItalia’s hands-on below.
