Intel requires battery life of at least nine hours with Ultrabook successor Athena

Intel will require laptops to have at least nine hours of battery life in daily use to qualify for Project Athena. That’s what the chipmaker says on Computex. Athena laptops can run on Windows or Chrome OS.

In addition to nine hours of battery life in mixed use, laptops should last for 16 hours when watching local videos, Intel says. In addition, the laptops must support fast charging via USB-C, so that users can continue for four hours after a half hour of charging.

In addition, laptops need to be able to wake up from sleep mode within a second and continue to receive notifications during that sleep state through a Lucid Sleep mode that maintains the connection to the modem. WiFi 6 is mandatory, a mobile connection via 4g or 5g is optional.

In terms of hardware, an Athena laptop must run at least an eighth-generation Core i5, in combination with at least 8GB of dual-channel memory and an NVME SSD of at least 256GB. Laptops must also support Thunderbolt 3. A touchscreen and microphones that enable voice recognition from far away are also mandatory.

The first Athena laptops should be on the market this fall. The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, Acer Swift 5, HP Envy 13 Wood and Lenovo Yoga S940, among others, meet the requirements to be an Athena laptop, according to Intel. Intel sees the Athena certification as a successor to the Ultrabook program from a few years ago. The processor maker had already announced Athena at the beginning of this year.