Computex 2019: Intel and Qualcomm lock horns in a battle for mobile productivity

Semiconductor behemoths Intel and Qualcomm are gearing up for a big battle ahead in the laptop and tablet space. You’d imagine AMD would be Intel’s biggest rival in the PC space, but both these giants aren’t targeting power users.

Both Intel and Qualcomm are banking on the “time is money” formula, targeting on-the-go professionals. The new laptops and tablets are engineered to increase a user’s productivity by increasing battery life and reducing wait times while maintaining the ultra-portable form factor.

Intel’s Project Athena and Ice Lake chips were two of the company’s biggest announcements at Computex 2019. The Ice Lake processors use Sunny Cove architecture to offer better performance, improved AI power, and longer battery life.

Project Athena, on the other hand, is a new class of laptop that Intel, which must pass specific requirements to receive the “Athena” branding. Some of those requirements include “real world” battery life that exceeds nine hours, four hours of battery life in a half hour charge and the laptop needs to wake from sleep mode in under a second.

Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8cx chipset at its Computex 2019 keynote, pitting it against an Intel Core i5 processor. The Snapdragon 8cx performed surprisingly well, in a web-browsing test, the chip outperformed the Core i5, loading 10 web pages around 13 seconds quicker.

In a multitasking test, the 8cx saved little over a minute over the Core i5. Qualcomm also partnered with Lenovo for “Project Limitless”. Project Limitless refers to a device Lenovo will ship in 2020 that runs off a 5G network and is powered by the Snapdragon 8cx chipset.

With Intel talking about a “less than a second” and Qualcomm referring to its 5G laptop as the “always connected PC”, neither of the two companies are really asking how many consumers actually want such innovation.

While there’s no harm in an ‘always on’ PC, imagine being constantly hooked to on your device during work, after work, before work. Both concepts are excellent in theory, but they pose a genuine risk to a user's work-life balance.