Pentium? Core i5? Core i7? Making sense of Intel’s convoluted CPU lineup | Hacker News Reader

Pentium? Core i5? Core i7? Making sense of Intel’s convoluted CPU lineup

arstechnica.com

41 pointsnkurz11 comments

Intel is just hurting itself with the naming scheme. I've lost count how many times I've heard people say "Oh, it has only i5/i7. I've had i5 already for X years. No point to upgrade."

I guess Nvidia / AMD graphics card style naming might work the best. Product name (Xeon, Pentium, whatever), #generation digit, 1-3 digits of entry/mid/premium level. Like Celeron 120 (generation 1, premium level 2(0)).

Right now non-technical people seem to be still expecting i6 and i8 CPUs.

When Intel's iX series was first released, the numbering scheme they had is almost exactly what you described.

i7-720: "7" was the performance tier, "20" the generation

So an i7-820 was the same generation, but a higher performance tier, and the i7-940 was yet another higher performance tier and a later generation.

They've later switched to a 4 digit numbering scheme which is decipherable, but not nearly as clear as the 3 digit scheme. The introduction of quadcore i5s and dual core i7s really muddled the waters.

What? The "20" was never the generation.

The i7-720, i7-820, and i7-940 are all Nehalem (ie first generation) core parts.

The numbering more or less makes sense if you prepend a 0 to the "720". Now your generations make perfect sense.

Current desktop product codes still more or less make sense. Mobile is a complete clusterfuck though.

I guess "generation" may have been the wrong word. "Age" or "iteration" may have been more appropriate. The 720 was launched Q3'09 and the 740 was Q3'10.

Oh, it's not only that you have "i5" CPUs spanning many years of iterations and different cores. You sometimes even have i5-<4digit> CPUs with a suffix: There's at least 3 versions of a i5-3470 (no suffix, S or T suffix).

Then there's the branding as Pentium or Celeron...

are you insinuating that the commoners dont know the difference between ivy bridge and skylake? Between a richland and a kaveri apu? Are you telling me.... Actually, I think I see your point.

The practical end of Moore's law is quite evident from this.

> And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing.

No kidding. I've been out of the "hardware game" for quite a few years now, having not built a PC in probably 15 years (and pretty much exclusively buying laptops for the last 10 or so). That was very apparent when I decided a few months ago to build myself a new server and began investigating options.

I was surprised by one thing in particular, though. According to TFA, the 4000-series (Haswell) are "the old chips". My primary machine for almost the last four years (until I bought a shiny new MacBook Pro back in mid-September) was a Lenovo Thinkpad W530 with an i7-3740QM chip. That is, AFAICT, one generation OLDER than "the old chips".

Nearly four years after I bought it, however, it remains the most powerful machine I own and still has better specs than most of the brand new laptops I see for sale at a quick glance. It has four cores at 2.70 GHz, 32 GB of RAM, and a pair of Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSDs (just installed within the last two weeks). The screen is nice and pretty, too, with full HD (1920x1080 resolution). It's still a monster of a laptop today. I opted for the biggest battery I could get in it and, at a guess, it's still probably at 75-80% (capacity-wise) of what it was on day one (battery life isn't one of FreeBSD's strengths, but it's acceptable).

Compare that to the 15" MacBook Pro I bought in September which has a quad-core i7 at 2.20 GHz, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of whatever newfangled storage technology (PCIe, I think?) Apple shoved in it. The screen resolution (2880x1800 vs 1920x1080) is higher although the difference isn't that noticeable unless you're really looking.

I am confused by one thing in TFA, though. It states, under the "Core i5" heading:

> These are all quad-core CPUs ...

I'm not sure if the article is wrong, I'm "misremembering" or what, but ISTR seeing plenty of i5 CPUs that are only dual core.

One thing is for sure, though, the identifying/labeling and marketing of CPUs is confusing as hell (and will probably only get worse). Fortunately, when building my new server recently, I found some posts online by others who were building very similar machines and was able to benefit from their knowledge. I considered myself very lucky when I managed to buy components that all worked together perfectly the first time and didn't have to return or exchange anything.

If you're going to be putting a new machine together anytime soon, definitely spend some time doing some research and make sure you purchase components that are compatible. It's amazing how much difference there can be between two similar pieces of hardware whose model numbers differ by only one digit or letter.

The only difference between those machines is the CPU. While the clock speed is lower, I wouldn't be surprised if the current quad i7 is much faster than the 4 year old quad.

Which really only adds to the confusion - its really not easy to tell how much faster this years i7 is against last year's i7, since clock speed doesn't really matter anymore when comparing across architectures.

>> These are all quad-core CPUs ...

>I'm not sure if the article is wrong, I'm "misremembering" or what, but ISTR seeing plenty of i5 CPUs that are only dual core.

It gets messy in the Laptop space (your quote was about Desktop processors). Most current laptop i5's are dual core with hyperthreading.

Honestly the one thing you need to know is if your processor is a celron or not.

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