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Is this somehow worse than having to know that a Core i7 could be a Skylake, Comet Lake, Ice Lake... or maybe it's a Lakefield? Oh nope the latest Lake is... an unrelated hybrid chip. And Comet Lake is Skylake. One of the Skylakes. I think. There's also Skylake-X.

But wait, that's just one of the confusions of Intel chips. Do they not also have workstation chips... and server chips... which are both called Xeon?

But... what about Core i5/i7/i9 vPro you say? Sorry yeah I forgot those were a thing. (And Intel still sells Pentium and Celeron... and apparently maybe still Atom and Itanium... https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors.... )

I don't know if Intel or AMD are doing this stuff with intention to confuse, inform or just market. AMD has mixed generations between CPU, APU and mobile APU (Zen 2 as 3xxx desktop CPU but 4xxx APUs for example)... but I would definitely say the product lines are pretty clear.

EPYC - Servers

Threadripper/Pro - Workstations

Ryzen - Consumer

> It's fine if Ryzen 11 and 13 had different sockets (like TR does). I don't need TR and I don't need TR Pro to denote product lines alongside the numbering scheme.

I disagree. AMD did the world a favour by going with the Threadripper brand name instead of the lazy path of mindlessly bumping a number and tagging another brand. The different socket alone is a clear and unambiguous reason to go with a distinct brand, but the clear bet on maxing out memory channels and PCI lanes at the expense of far higher power consumption makes them an entirely different product targetted at an entirely different market segment.

They're merely matching what intel is offering

i* = ryzen *

threadripper = skylake-X and the like (HEDT processors)

threadripper-pro = xeon-w

epyc = xeon

I omitted various embedded/low-end/iGPU/mobile lines. The only thing where AMD has nothing comparable is the low power atoms. On the other hand intel has nothing to offer in the console market

Threadripper was a halo product and does not use the same socket the Ryzen processors use. To give it its own series name was necessary, otherwise it would have lead to a lot of confusion. People would have bought Ryzen 11 expecting to run those processors on AM4 boards.

"It's fine if Ryzen 11 and 13 had different sockets (like TR does)."

Intel uses a different socket for the i9-10980XE than they do for the i9-10900. They have done this in the past, it doesn't seem like it is an issue for them to put Extreme Edition (their halo line) into the same naming convention. They don't even make a new tier for it, they just stick it at whatever tier is highest.

Intel's socket confusion situation isn't something that AMD should seek to emulate.

AMD has had a GREAT story with their socket - the length it has been supported is incredible. I hope they keep that up and don't confuse ryzen parts with nonsocket compatible parts.

And it results in confusion like 10900X (a terrible CPU) vs 10900K. Why do you want one or the other?

You probably don't want the i9-10900X, it's worse in every way except it works on the same socket as other Skylake-X parts. It has the same core count, on mostly an older version of the same architecture, at lower clocks, for higher power consumption, in a more expensive platform than the i9-10900X. In basically every use case, the extra clocks on the i7-10700K even make it superior for multi-threaded tasks despite having 25% less cores.

So there's no simplification here. You can't look at i9-10900X and i7-10700k and go "Bigger numbers better, so simple". You're comparing the worst HEDT CPU to the upper end of consumer CPUs. The only reason to buy it is if you consider you're buying HEDT for the platform (you need the extra PCIe lanes). That information is not in Intel's model names, but AMD put it in theirs, which seems better at explaining that difference (also AMD don't have a third gen 16C/32T threadripper SKU to complete with their own 3950X).

Threadripper is a different socket, calling it the same as Ryzen would be confusing.

Processor branding is garbage, but paying attention to the 3/5/7 as if it means anything is buying into it.

What you need to know is really what socket/chipset the thing works with, what architecture it is (sky/whatever lake, Zen 2, etc), how many cores, what features (smt, avx, ecc, gpu, etc), frequency, and power limits.

So mamy people say "i have an i7" as if that means anything over time. An early i7 is a 4-core part, where 4-core parts are entry level now, and of course a 10 year old part is behind a lot on IPC compared to a recent processor.

> Ryzen 3, 5, 7 which was fine

> Now we have Ryzen 9 because Intel made Core i9

Or maybe because it was the natural +2 progression

Intel has had Core i3,i5, and i7 lines for a decade, and when Ryzen was announced they had 3, 5, and 7, which was clearly meant for comparison against Intel. Intel created the i9 line shortly after Ryzen's launch, which you could reasonably claim was a natural progression. The introduction and numbering of Ryzen 9 was clearly a response to Intel having a tier that AMD didn't, the +2 happened not because it was the natural thing to do, it happened because that's what Intel did. If Intel had called i9 the i10, AMD definitely wouldn't have called their new tier Ryzen 9, they would have called it Ryzen 10.

And I think Intel copied it from BMW. ;) I miss the 286, 386, 486 days. Things were much simpler then.

"AMD, we're getting to the point of too many different product lines."

I legitimately do not understand writing your post directly addressing AMD as if they're actually listening to you.

They might be, this is HN after all!

It seems like a perfectly fine way to construct an argument to me.