What is Intel Evo and what does Project Athena have to do with it?

The beauty of premium laptops is that you don’t necessarily need to understand processor models, understand the difference between different types of SSDs, and choose the right display for your purposes. For example, laptops like MacBook Pro, HP EliteBook, Asus ZenBook or Dell XPS have raised the bar of requirements quite high and never fall below it. When a potential buyer comes to a store to buy one, he expects to see a high level of flow Rate and comfort, a maximum of useful technical features and a minimum of unpleasant surprises. Understanding all this, Intel launched an initiative in 2019 called Project Athena, a kind of special squad of laptops that will include only the best of the best.

On paper everything looked great. The program focused on such important things for a laptop as wake-up time, fast charging power, display brightness and color rendition. Intel's plans were to create several test laboratories that unite manufacturers. The only problem was that it all looked like a closed club to which no buyers were invited. It turned out almost like with the gopher from DMB: no one had ever seen laptops with Project Athena certification, but formally they existed.

In general, Intel failed to establish communication between manufacturers and buyers, and a year later the Athena project was relaunched under the new name Intel Evo. According to Intel, now everything will be transparent, and users will be able to easily understand which laptops are included in this program. In addition to stickers on cases, many retail stores will have demonstration stands; online stores and trading platforms will create an appropriate search filter.

Benefits of the Intel Evo Platform


In terms of hardware, a typical laptop with the Evo label should be based on a Core i7 or i5 processor of the Tiger Lake generation (or older) with Iris Xe-level graphics, have fast dual-channel RAM of at least 8 GB, and also be equipped with a fast NVMe SSD with a capacity of 256 GB or more . In addition, a laptop with the Evo logo must have modern communication modules (Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5), support the Thunderbolt interface, have a well-calibrated display, a precision touchpad and a high-quality audio system.


Mandatory items of the program are a quiet and at the same time efficient cooling system, fast charging and a capacious battery that can provide the customer with at least 9 hours of battery life. Often in laptops from the Intel Evo program you can find a touch display and a shockproof case, but these are more likely additional options than requirements from Intel itself. Certain requirements are also imposed on the appearance of laptops. There are no strict specifications here, but in general terms, any Evo-book should at least look decent on the same table as a thin and elegant MacBook.


And this is just what floats on the surface. In reality, there are a lot of insignificant parameters that usually pass by the characteristics table, but at the same time significantly affect the impression of using the laptop. Intel boasts that when testing laptops for Evo compliance, they are tested in at least 25 specific tests to evaluate the flow Rate of communication modules, microphone quality, cooling system efficiency, etc.


Here are just a few of these requirements:

  • The power of an audio system in watts is not the best way to assess its quality. Instead of power, Intel went the other way and set the following requirements for the built-in audio system: at a distance of 50 cm, the sound pressure should be at least 78 dB, and the frequency of the reproduced bass should be no higher than 353 Hz.
  • In order not to suffer from lousy conference calls, requirements were also set for built-in microphones. The signal-to-noise ratio must be at least 63 dB, and the volume level must not exceed 1 dB. In turn, the webcam resolution should be at least 720p, and the frame rate should not fall below 30 FPS.
  • 30 minutes of fast charging should provide at least 4 hours of battery life for the laptop.
  • Mandatory support for Far-field, OpenVino and WinML AI technologies.
  • Quiet cooling system with coolers up to 15 mm in diameter. And ideally, silent passive cooling.

A detailed list can be found on the official Evo project page - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/systems-devices/laptops/evo.html

Intel Evo Laptops

What does the Intel Evo platform give us?

Flagship flow Rate. Using the latest generation of Intel Core processors, Evo laptops will perform on average 40% faster than models from two years ago. The laptops also support Intel Adaptix technology, which automatically subtly optimizes the operation of the laptop, playing with its power consumption, processor voltage, etc. Thanks to this, Evo laptops hold up well even when rendering video. Although, even despite the use of fairly good integrated Intel Iris graphics, games and video work are not exactly the path of Evo laptops. For such purposes, a laptop or desktop PC with a powerful discrete video card is better suited.

Tools for creativity. The powerful hardware of Evo laptops guarantees high flow Rate in professional applications from Adobe, Blackmagic and Steinberg. And mandatory support for the Thunderbolt 4 interface will make it possible to connect several high-end monitors to the laptop and generally exchange data at maximum speed. An additional bonus is hardware support for 10-bit video and the AV1 codec.


Reliability and speed of “awakening”. According to Intel, laptops from the Intel Evo program wake up from Sleep mode one and a half times faster than two-year-old models with similar technical characteristics. That is, no longer than one second. This was possible due to the absence of the “sleep” mode in the form in which it was used previously. Instead, the system goes into “power saving” mode. Due to the lack of a full-fledged “sleep” mode, the battery discharges faster.

Quality of network coverage. Thanks to modern Wi-Fi 6 modules with support for additional data processing channels, the wireless communication speed in Intel Evo laptops has increased by 3 times. Again, the comparison is made with models of the previous generation and the one before last with an identical price tag and technical equipment.

Conference call. Thanks to the use of high-quality microphones, webcams with a resolution of at least 720p and audio systems from renowned manufacturers, Intel Evo laptops guarantee high quality and stable communication during conference calls.


Increased battery life. Only devices with really fast charging are selected for the Evo ranks. The minimum charging power requirement is 65 W. Thanks to this, they can be charged even during very difficult, exhausting work and provide a minimum of 4 hours of battery life after a 30-minute charge.

Data protection. Most of the announced models feature a combo of a fingerprint sensor and a camera for facial scanning. Higher-level devices have an additional option to unlock using a Bluetooth key on the smartphone. And these are just the basic features. Using a fingerprint, it will be possible to lock only certain folders or system drives, the Wake on Approach feature using the camera will allow you to automatically unlock the device as soon as the customer approaches the laptop, and a thing called Walk Away Lock, on the contrary, will block the desktop as soon as the owner - he walked away.