Exclusive: Intel To Have More Than 100 Evo Certified Laptops By The End Of 2021

Choosing the right laptop is a very tedious task. Most laptops look the same externally and even on the specs sheet, but do lack some parameters that hinder the overall user experience. One way to ensure a premium user experience with great battery life is to look for the Evo badge.

Intel Evo certification is a byproduct of Project Athena, where a brand uses certain parameters to ensure that the laptop offers the best possible performance for every use case. I recently had an opportunity to interact with Akshay Kamath, Director, Client Sales, Intel, giving me an insight into the making of Evo-certified devices.

According to Akshay, there has seen a surge in the demand for PC from the last year due to the pandemic. According to IDC, 3.1 million laptops have been shipped in Q1 of 2021, which constitutes a 73 percent year-on-year growth.

Intel came up with project Athena in 2018, which was an industry-wide effort to innovate beyond the CPU. Akshay also said that a laptop with the Evo badge is a promise from Intel to the customers that the laptop will meet their needs in terms of performance, responsiveness, and battery life.

Akshay said that the brand tests for various parameters to qualify a laptop as Evo certified. An Evo-certified laptop will always be thin-and-light, and the company has developed custom workflows, which are measured under real-world conditions.

These workflows will test for parameters like consistent performance and battery life using unique testing methodologies. Only laptops that meet the key experience indicators (KEI) will get the Evo badge.

Minimum KEI Requirements For Intel Evo Laptops

• Consistently responsive on battery
• Wake from sleep in less than one second
• Nine or more hours of real-world battery life with FHD display
• Should support quick charging (four or more hours of battery life with 30 minutes of charging)

Akshay further commented that there will be many laptops that offer one or more of these KEI. However, only laptops that have all these KEI will be getting the Evo certification. Besides, a laptop has to have an 11th Gen Intel Tiger Lake CPU (Core i5 or Core i7) with Iris Xe graphics along with Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6 connectivity.

Additional features like premium high-quality audio, high-quality web camera, and should also have a 1080p display. No matter what brand the laptop is, an Intel Evo-certified laptop will have all these features.

When I asked if an OEM has to pay for the Evo certification, Akshay confirmed that OEMs do not have to pay anything to get Evo certification. Intel collaborates with the OEMs to set up labs and conduct these tests if the laptops meet the real-world performance benchmarks and criteria.

Akshay also confirmed that Intel has already verified more than 85 Windows OS based laptops as Evo certified from OEMs like Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung. He confirmed that there will be over 100 Evo-certified laptops by the end of 2021 from 15 OEMs.