That's fine if you're buying new. Is there an i5 that beats an older i7 in performance? When buying a used laptop or desktop, how much extra research do I need to do to figure out which processor I'm actually getting? There's been 13 years of i7's.
Of course. I got a new laptop last year with a Core i5-10300H, and it easily beats my desktop i7-4790K, despite the same number of cores, in every workload.
UserBenchmark is your friend for this kind of thing really:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/
I do have to say that nowadays buying an Intel CPU is a really bad idea though.
Product lines 1 - 10. Bigger is better.
A minimal number of qualifiers next to the numbers, ideally just 1 of them next to a product line number (Pro/Home/Hobby/Enterprise/whatever).
Date, month and year format if you really want flexibility.
OblioCorp Oblio 1 Home 2020.06. Oblio 10 Enterprise 2021.04.
How hard is that? Not that hard, from where I'm standing.
Consider; “hey man check out my new M1 machine!” Versus: “hey man check out my M1 2021.04”
Even with the Core series it’s short and sweet.
“10th gen. Core i7” still sounds futuristic and always will.
Ryzen 7 also.
Honestly I think folks here are overthinking this stuff. It’s easy enough to compare the specs on a 10th gen cpu vs 8th gen. I think that’s easier than comparing different product names.
For instance, just by the names: Pentium 5 versus Core i5 it’s not quite clear unless folks were old enough to remember Pentiums. Whereas, everyone knows current generation has better processing than previous generation.
Also, given that AMD copied Intel's 3/5/7/9 numbering, I'll be interested to see if in a few years they're selling a 10800x.
Noone would ever say it like that. They would simply say: “hey man check out my new M1 machine!” And if it happened to come at a generation shift the context would make it obvious if it was the old generation at a bargain or the brand new generation. (or that the person saying it couldn't care less about specs and generations)
Now if you would buy a used computer, or would like to compare your current i7 to the latest i7 - then you would take notice. How much difference is there between a i5 2021.04 vs. i7 2016.8 ?
That is dead simple to google and reason about.
Compare that to: So what computer do you have? Oh, it is an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. I have no idea what decade that machine is from. And noone remembers the specific version, and if they do I have no idea how to parse it anyway.
And product lines are speced 12 months in advance.
So you need precise demand prediction all the way along your supply chain for this to work.
Apple never says iPad 2019 on their website, until you start digging really hard.
Vendors want version numbers to push upgrades to consumers. They don't want to deal with demand forcasting for something with a limited time of life though.
Nobody said that they have to make that versioning public and shout it from the rooftops.
Users do use the informal versioning that I mentioned, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to differentiate the products. I've heard "MacBook Pro 2015" a million times.
And a date <<is>> a version number. It also nicely auto-increments to prove to your customers that the latest thing is better than the old one.
Doodad Pro, 2021 edition. It's not that hard, as I was saying.
The alternative is the garbage that everyone is doing. WH-1000XM3, really?!?