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HP Elite Dragonfly - what kind of Athena laptop are you?

Finally, the editors of the blog managed to get acquainted with the representative of the new trend of laptops, called Intel Project Athena - HP Elite Dragonfly model . We were not going to take bread from serious thematic publications, which already viewed this model from all sides and delivered its verdict to it. Rather, we were more important than the sensations from this particular laptop and from the Project Athena concept as a whole. There is also reason to recall Intel's previous projects in this area - Centrino and Ultrabook.



Predecessors: Centrino, Ultrabook


Project Athena is not Intel's first laptop initiative. For many hawkers, the appearance of the Intel Centrino trademark must have been remembered - this happened in 2003. The laptop with the Centrino logo included 3 essential elements: an Intel Pentium M processor, an Intel 855 chipset, and an Intel Pro / Wireless 2100 wireless network interface. Later, with the change of generations of Intel chips, Centrino versions: Centrino Duo based on Intel Core processors also changed. Solo / Duo, Centrino 2 based on Intel Core 2 Duo and so on.

I also remember well the time of the “early Centrino” - my very first laptop, purchased in 2005, was on the Intel Sonoma platform (the second generation of Centrino). Without adding anything new from a technological point of view (all platform components lived their own lives without additional logos), Intel Centrino, when it appeared, increased interest in laptops and, to no lesser extent, Wi-Fi technology. And although wireless networks didn’t enter our lives right away, Centrino was definitely one of the bricks in the foundation on which their popularity stands.

Intel's next milestone in notebook history is the 2011 Ultrabook. Unlike Centrino, ultrabooks were more about the user experience, rather than about technology as such. Yes, they suggested the use of certain processors (namely, Intel Core of the second and third generation), which implemented a number of important features from the point of view of the concept. But the most important features were named precisely consumer properties, namely: thickness not more than 21 mm, waking up from hibernation in no more than 7 seconds and at least 5 hours of battery life.

9 years have passed since the appearance of ultrabooks - what do we have in the dry residue? The ultrabook concept emphasized the main thing that we want to see in a computer - it should not hamper our actions. Reseeding in 2013 for an ultrabook, I realized that there is no turning back: the Core processor and SSD drive are the minimum that is simply necessary for comfortable work. As expected, innovations went down the lines - in 10 years, productivity has fallen significantly. Many budget models of today are to some extent ultrabooks.

Project Athena - what's on top today?


From an ideological point of view, Project Athena can be considered a logical continuation of the ultrabook project. It also describes the requirements for the characteristics of the laptop with respect to ease of use. The requirements, of course, have become stricter over time. Their general list is as follows.



Agree, it looks quite uncompromising. Particularly stringent requirements are placed on the battery and drive. We write down the main points of these requirements:
  • wake up time is less than 1 second,
  • biometric authentication
  • 8 GB or more of dual-channel RAM,
  • 256 GB PCIe drive
  • 16 hours of playing video from local storage,
  • 9 hours of Wi-Fi internet,
  • half an hour of charging for 4 hours of work,
  • Thunderbolt 3 port, Wi-Fi 6, optional LTE,
  • 12-15 inch display with Full HD,
  • keyboard backlight, stylus support.
It is noteworthy that the processor requirements are concise: Intel Core i5 or i7. Initially, only the tenth generation Core processors were considered in the framework of Project Athena, but subsequently won back. We will return to this topic.

HP Elite Dragonfly



We now turn to the immediate hero of the occasion. HP Elite Dragonfly - a model that fully complies with the requirements of Project Athena, both in quantitative and qualitative parameters. Judge for yourself.
CPUIntel Core i7-8565U
VideoIntel UHD Graphics 620
Memory16 GB DDR3
Storage deviceIntel Optane PCIe, 480 GB
Display13.3 ”FullHD or 4k
Wireless interfacesWi-Fi 6, 4G LTE
PortsUSB 1 x USB Type-A, 2 x USB Type-C
Additional portsUSB 3.1 Type-C / Thunderbolt 3 Combo
Battery56 W / h
Dimensions30.4 x 19.7 x 1.6 cm
Weight1 kg
Everything is in place, and even a frameless display on three sides is almost like in an iPhone.

As you can see, the laptop is based on the 8th generation processor (Whiskey Lake) of the 2018 model. HP explains their choices by commitment to proven solutions. Apparently, this is the general mood among the market leaders: Gen8 have proven themselves well and to this day are completely satisfied with the manufacturers. Although there are already plenty of models on Gen10.

The appearance of the laptop is almost flawless (I “almost” put it on a glossy display, in my personal opinion, they are impractical). Dragonfly is thin and almost weightless in the hands. It is hard to suspect that such an elegant little thing has excellent autonomy, but it is. After a working day in office mode, the indicator showed 60% of the battery - it turns out that you can go on a short trip with this laptop without charging.

Top laptops with a price tag of $ 2k can afford branded chips. Here I would single out two. Firstly, a pen (or a stylus, as you like). The pen is an active Bluetooth device that is charged via the USB-C connector. The laptop has a utility for setting up the pen and several programs that allow you to use it. Among the shortcomings, I note that the tiny pen battery discharges quite quickly even without use - this will have to be monitored so as not to get into trouble. And secondly, this HP Sure View privacy feature, which reduces the viewing angle of the display to 35 °, is not new, but original. There is another protective tool in the laptop, simple but effective - the camera above the display is closed by a mechanical shutter.



It so happened that just a month before the test, I bought an Asus Pro 5440 laptop for home use. It is almost “Athena-compatible”, built on the same platform as Dragonfly. The main difference between laptops is Core i5 instead of i7 and the usual SATA SSD instead of Optane PCIe drive. There was a great temptation to compare the speed of the storage subsystem, all other things being equal.



The Asus Pro 5440 has Kingston's SATA SSD RBUSNS8180DS3256GJ. The drive in the HP Elite Dragonfly is defined as Intel Optane + 477GBSSD - a hybrid PCIe NVMe drive Intel H10 , consisting of 32GB Intel Optane Memory caching memory and 512 GB Intel QLC 3D NAND SSD. Testing was performed using the well-known utility ATTO Disk Benchmark.



The difference, as they say, is obvious - it is no coincidence that the Athena specification insists on an NVMe SSD. Test results correlate quite accurately with subjective sensations and time serifs. SSD is noticeably lagging, another thing is that in real use the response parameters still remain in a comfortable zone. And the price difference between these two drives is very smart - 3-4 times.

Instead of a conclusion


Of course, it's too early to write a conclusion for this topic - everything is just beginning. Perhaps, from the point of view of PR, Intel's new initiative looks less bright than the previous ones. But do not forget that it is much deeper and more voluminous. Among other things, Project Athena is a consortium of leading computer makers and a network of Intel labs that work together to improve consumer notebook performance. The fruits of their work will be available to the market and will find their place, including in budget models, which will also become “a little bit Athena” over time.

As for the HP Elite Dragonfly, he impressed us. Its originality, power, design. Perhaps this should be the flagship. If there are executive class laptops - this is just about him. But for everyday work, he is probably too pompous. Whether it’s my workhorse :)

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