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mhh__

I didn't realize Intel had shipped a mobile chip with AVX-512.

Also, Intel for the love of God sort out your product names, use a proper system rather than /dev/random Lake

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> Also, Intel for the love of God sort out your product names, use a proper system rather than /dev/random Lake

Suffixes are the main thing on Intel's systems.

U -- Ultrabook class 15W.

M -- Previously the standard laptop class 25W.

H / HQ / etc. etc. -- High-performance laptop: 45W. Q for quad-core but that doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore.

T -- Power-optimized Desktop

No suffix -- Standard Desktop

K -- Unlocked Desktop.

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The i5 / i7 is a marketing name, and more about MSRP than anything else. You can mostly ignore it. i7 and i9 are more expensive, while i3 and i5 are cheaper.

The last 3 digits are highly-specific codes within a family. The other digits are the generation number: 8 for 8th generation, 11 for 11th generation. For example, 2700K means 2nd generation Unlocked Desktop processor.

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I personally start with the suffix: if you know someone's looking for a battery life longer than 4-hours, I go with the U-class, then I pick out an MSRP for them (usually i7, but i5 or i3 if they care more about budget).

If the battery life under 2-hours is fine, I push for H-class for the higher performance (though these are usually on 17in laptops).

I stay up to date and make sure that I buy a current-generation, or at worst a "last generation" product if I know that who I'm talking to cares about price. That means that I will recommend a 11th generation i7 to most people, but if people care about price, maybe a 10th generation i7 or a 11th generation i5.

It's not even worth trying to remember because they keep adding new features and tiers. The Y-series are the real low-power laptop parts. They just added a never-before-seen KB designator to the newest desktop-class 11th Gen parts. Then with the Xeons there are R, W, and M suffixes, where M doesn't mean the same thing as the Core M.

Y has been around for years, and so has K, H / HQ, M, T, U designations. The newest designations (F for GPU-free) haven't really changed the meaning of the old ones.

Xeon has its own naming convention that was changed maybe 5ish years ago? (Whenever they went from E3 / E5 / E7 designation to Xeon Bronze / Silver / Gold / Platinum). There are also naming schemes for the Atom-line, but these aren't commonly bought by consumers.

Another one with some relevance right now in an era where GPUs are hard to get is "F" which signifies that it doesn't have an integrated GPU.

They have an integrated GPU, but it's just (most likely broken on the die and) turned off in the final product. There's no dedicated process to create these abominations. Same with most 10/8 core chips for example: If the process for the 10 core die results in one or two faulty cores they just turn them off and sell it as 8 core. This is basically true for most mainstream CPU and GPU vendors/products.

This also results in situations like for example selling working 10 cores as 8 cores (with cores turned off) to fulfill market needs in case of shortages ... shortages of "faulty" dies. In some cases methods are available to "upgrade" you chip again. tl;dr how to abuse chip binning (or how to void your warranty)

Yeah, I'm aware of the way they bin chips and segment the market, I was talking about "not having" the capability.

As I understand it, the ability to re-enable parts isn't really a thing any more. It was true historically that you used to be able to re-enable cores, but most modern chips have the components fused off at a hardware level.

The code names are not the problem. Basically all companies use engineering code names so that engineers can talk about unreleased products without accidentally revealing things. And since you should not be able to divine anything about the products from them, picking random geographical features is just fine.

The problem is that their actual product naming is such a massive mess that people prefer to learn the code names instead of trying to figure out what, exactly, a i7-1165G7 is and how it relates to, say, a i5-11400H?

That too, but if the microarchitectures had a numeric identity for example (even in parallel to the xyz lake name) the route to a better numerical ID for CPU's would be easier.

That's originally what the generation was.

Then it became inconvenient so generations and µarchs got disconnected (because marketing, and then more marketing as they had to introduce µarch refreshes because they couldn't move through their plans)

I had no idea they'd gone back to 4 numbers for some of their CPUs. What does G7 even mean?

Only four? i5-11400H is a real name too:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/213805/...

Yes but that's the normal pattern: the historical naming was XYYY where X was the generation and YYY was the SKU. With the 10th generation, this became XXYYY, continuing the pattern.

Graphics Level 7. Basically a relative indication of the iGPU capabilities.

> The problem is that their actual product naming is such a massive mess that people prefer to learn the code names instead of trying to figure out what

They actually have a guide explaining all the bits. It doesn't really matter since most of it is arbitrary and marketing (including µarch rebadging same as the GPU vendors), so even within a generation it tends to tell you very little in and of itself.

The problem is Intels incredible tendency to cut, slice, and dice their market into tiny slivers of segments. For example Comet Lake has 80ish SKUs listed on its wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Lake_(microprocessor)

Combine this with the fact that they have completely different processor families for different segments concurrent with these, there are going to be hundreds of SKUs in total on the market at any point.

I don't know if there is any sort of naming system that can salvage that to make any intuitive sense. The actual product names mostly serve to function as keys to search ARK.

Is that Intel marketing 80 SKUs of their own volition; or is that 80 large customers each ordering a million-piece custom configuration, and then Intel figuring that, if they're going to make a part in quantity, they may as well let other people buy it if they want?

Compare/contrast to others e.g. Qualcomm. If Qualcomm can do this without fracturing their product line into incomprehensible gibberish then why can’t Intel?

A lot of it is presumably binning [0]. They make a bunch of CPUs and check each to find the number of defective cores and the max clock speed it can run at before malfunctioning, then slap on the appropriate product number for that combination.

[0]: https://www.techspot.com/article/2039-chip-binning/

Honestly 80 models that differ by clock speed, core count, or target form factor bothers me way less than trying to figure out the difference between Comet Lake, Cascade Lake, Ice Like, Rocket Lake, etc.

They've been shipping AVX-512 in client SKUs since the very first Ice Lake machines, actually (my Dell XPS 9300 Ice Lake features it.) It's at the point where all forward client SKUs will at least come with 512-F

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