• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2020

Intel and Google plan to extend their existing partnership to design chips and specifications for Chromebooks built on Project Athena.

The framework, Project Athena, announced in 2019, supports design and technical specifications to build high-performance laptops for streaming media, gaming, and enterprise apps.

The more sophisticated the technology, the easier it will become for brands to build out immersive media content and advertising and support search.

The new design has beentested and verified to deliver system-level innovation such as battery life, consistent responsiveness, instant wake, application compatibility and more.

Intel has verified 25 Project Athena designs to date. Intel EVP Gregory Bryant said the partnership resulted in the first two Project Athena-verified Chromebooks, the ASUS Chromebook Flip, and the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook.

At CES, Samsung and ASUS also rolled out the first Chromebooks with these specs. Samsung will begin shipping its device in the first quarter of 2020, and the ASUS Chromebook Flip C436 becomes available for purchase beginning in early March 2020.

Intel also expects to verify approximately 50 more designs across Windows and Chrome in 2020.

Intel also unveiled a Core mobile processor, code-named Tiger Lake, built using Intel’s Xe graphics architecture-based GPUs, which provides the ability to use the chips in artificial intelligence and other computing-intense applications.