Intel SVP Gregory Bryant Opens Up On Project Athena Laptop Initiative (hothardware.com) 41
MojoKid shares a report from HotHardware: Earlier this year, Intel revealed its Project Athena initiative and earlier this month gave us a broad overview on what to expect with future computing designs. Like Centrino (which brought laptops into the Wi-Fi age) and Ultrabooks (which touted the idea of thin and light premium laptops), Project Athena encompasses a collection of technologies and design goals that Intel hopes OEMs will employ when developing new products. At its heart, Intel is looking to help foster the introduction of premium laptops that adhere to specific key tenets, in an effort to enhance the PC user experience.
"One of the things we've learned over the years is that a great PC experience means different things to different people, from gamers to content creators to office workers," said Gregory Bryant, Intel SVP of And GM of Intel's Client Computing Group. "This is where you see us focusing. We want to give our partners everything they need to create incredible and differentiated PCs, purpose-built to what real people want." Powering these systems will be Intel's new 10nm Sunny Cove processor platform. Additional details regarding the use of 5G and harnessing AI to optimize software on the fly for common use cases were also disclosed. Intel noted the first round of Project Athena devices will launch in the latter half of 2019 and we should expect to see production ramp in 2020.
"One of the things we've learned over the years is that a great PC experience means different things to different people, from gamers to content creators to office workers," said Gregory Bryant, Intel SVP of And GM of Intel's Client Computing Group. "This is where you see us focusing. We want to give our partners everything they need to create incredible and differentiated PCs, purpose-built to what real people want." Powering these systems will be Intel's new 10nm Sunny Cove processor platform. Additional details regarding the use of 5G and harnessing AI to optimize software on the fly for common use cases were also disclosed. Intel noted the first round of Project Athena devices will launch in the latter half of 2019 and we should expect to see production ramp in 2020.
real people want (Score:1)
real people want CPUs that don't have glaring security defects
Re: (Score:2)
Do any of the "glaring security defects" really affect the everyday computer user on a laptop? Aren't most of them really just problems if you're running unknown code such as on virtual machines that can be running software from any source whatsoever? If you control the software that goes onto the machine, is there really any problem with the processors?
Re:real people want (Score:4, Informative)
Do you browse websites? Then you don't control the software running on your machine. It's a problem for everyone except scientific clusters, basically.
Re: (Score:3)
That's something that can be mitigated by browser maker themselves. Web pages don't send machine code directly to the CPU. All the web pages use scripting languages or sandboxes that generate the machine code. The browsers themselves should be fixed so that they don't generate executable code that can compromise the system.
Re: real people want (Score:1)
broken arch (Score:2, Interesting)
What, is intel finally organising a project fixing its broken insure speculative processing? Are they finally Opensourcing IME, and day 0 coreboot support so we can finally have a secure platform?
What.... no? Just more buzzword filled insecure shit?
Oh, well, not interested intel. hope you die soon.
What a milquetoast "tech" initiative (Score:2)
Microarchitecture still not fixed. (Score:3)
The interesting thing is that the core of the Sunny Cove microarchitecture is untouched and therefore still doesn't fix the meltdown or spectre flaws. Instead, they are using the additional hardware they have added to address the performance impacts that the software fixes for vulnerabilities have.
This is not what I would call a winning plan but rather a panicked effort to stop people from realizing that AMD is faster and cheaper.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, 2004 all over again. More subtle this time though. I guess their pockets still feel it.
Re: (Score:2)
No reason for them to fix security (Score:3)
First of all, I think that they should be fixing their security problems.
However, from their point of view, what is their business case? There are no large lawsuits coming up about loss of money from either the security problem itself or the loss of processing power caused by implementing the patches. There hasn't been a big, or even a small, conversion of people moving over to AMD because of this problem. The major computer manufacturers stayed with Intel.
So why would Intel change it's roadmap for something that really isn't hurting it? They can make the required changes in processors that are currently in the design phase with little cost. If they were to do that with the chips coming out now it would be much more costly to go back and redo all of the testing. Plus it would delay the chips. So from their point of view it's best to make the changes further down the line.
I don't agree with that logic but I can understand it from a business point of view. Let's face it, it's the business folk at the top of the companies and not engineers. They are going to make decisions that hardware and software people aren't always going to like.
Re: (Score:3)
First of all, I think that they should be fixing their security problems.
I don't. I prefer performance over closing a security hole that is completely irrelevant to me. This goes double and triple for laptop architectures where speculative execution is all but irrelevant.
But then I also don't own volcano insurance and don't plan on relying on the lottery to get rich so that puts me at odds with many people here.
There hasn't been a big, or even a small, conversion of people moving over to AMD because of this problem.
That should tell you a lot about the problem. The fact that even the Linux kernel team leave the mitigations disabled by default should tell you even more.
Different compu
But, but, there is Chinese components? (Score:2)
Decent Screens and SSDs for all (Score:3)
What we really need in the laptop market is decent screens and SSDs across all models. There is no reason in 2019 to be selling laptops without an SSD in them, or with a 1366x768 screen. 1080 really shouldn't be too much to ask, and we really shouldn't have spinning hard drives unless the laptop has room for a second drive in it, which it should because they've removed the optical drive on most laptops.
Personally, I wish they would change the whole model for selling them, so that you could just buy a base model and stick in your choice or ssd, and ram so they didn't have to ship a thousand different models to meet everyone's needs and people could just pick the option that works best for them without replacing parts you already paid for. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to get an i3 with 1 tb ssd and 4 gb of ram, or an i5 with 16 gb of ram and a 256 gb ssd, or an i7 with 4gb of RAM and a 128 GB SSD.
Ultrabooks were a mixed blessing (Score:3)
Centrino didn't usher in wifi, this is PR fluff. (Score:2)
Wifi was in a ton of laptops before Centrino, and I was never clear on what intel was trying to accomplish with their centrino branding. You didn't need it to have wifi, so it was meaningless as far as I could tell. Thin and light had been done before too, why do we need intel to "lead" things that've already happened? That's not what that means...
As PR fluff pieces go, this one's particularly bad. "We're doing more of the same! It's all innovative and new!"
Seriously?
Re: (Score:2)
Project Athena is a joke (Score:2)
When compared to the achievements of the past their current strategy is a joke. Centrino introduced the concept of universal connection. Ultrabooks fundamentally reshaped the form factor of the laptops. Athena? ...
Well the core tenants of Athena are battery life, ready to go, performance, high performance and form factor integration. Aside from that last one (whatever the hell it means) this is crap that Intel should have been delivering continuously anyway since it's precisely what the OEMs have been askin
Namespace Error (Score:3)
"Project Athena" means X Windows, Kerberos, Zephyr, and all that. At least for MIT grads of a certain age (1980s). I wish Intel could have chosen another name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
MIT called... (Score:2)