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Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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.

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.

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