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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why Intel stuck with the i3, i5, i7, and later i9 branding across so many generations.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people wonder why their 10-year old computer is slow. “But I have an i7”

Exactly. They should have named them Air, Pro and iMac. That way you clearly can see which is fastest and which year they came out.

It seem pretty common for people who own Apple products to say "2013 macbook air" and that is easy to find on the device or in the software. Apple makes it pretty clear newer is better. Intel has a bunch of lakes and numbers and an easier way to tell would be nice all around. Though Apple has less skus to differentiate making it much easier for them.

It's pretty common for people who own Intel cpus to say 5th gen or 9th gen or to easily find on the device or in the software the name of cpu like i5-4670k or i9-9900K

I think GP is talking about a branding problem though. Non tech savvy people may not realise that the i7 in that new computer at the store is different from the i7 written on the front of their PC.

For years CPUs had numbers that went up: 286, 386, 486, Pentium.

After that, it was Mhz and Ghz that people used to rate a CPU.

But none of those things are as relevant as they used to be.

So what number goes up? i3, i5, i7, i9. That's what Intel is telling us. That's the number they want us to see.

Even on Mac OS, when you go to "About This Mac" -> "System Report", you only see the iBranding and not the generation (I see "6-Core Intel Core i7" on mine for example).

from about this mac:

> MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)

> Processor 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

prettly clear there

But Mac date year doesn’t always correspond with the intel processor year/generation.

So which one in the following is fastest: i7-960, i5-2400K, or i3-1115G4? And where does Pentium Gold 7505 fit in?

Except for the Pentium, I can tell the age from the number. The i3 is probably the fastest, but since stuff uses less power these days, there's a small chance the old i5 is faster. I'd look up benchmarks if about to make a purchase. Is the Pentium equivalent in age to 7th gen core i, or is their numbering different?

Now consider that you are an average person, not so tech-savvy, don't really follow CPU industry news.

How would you differentiate?

These aren't realistic choices unless you are buying a used PC. But even less savy consumers understand generations, if you present a fast 1st gen model versus a not the fastest 11th gen model I think the majority will go with the newer model.

So which of these is faster Macbook Air or Macbook Air?

Those are all fast(to the extent matters to their marketing)

Intel would be a lot more motivated to show you which products were newer if their newer products were actually better.

Thank you for saying this.

Honestly - it's not even the i3, i5, i7, i9 thing. It's the fact that two i5s, etc; can be ludicrously different in terms of performance from one another because of the sub-generations within the named generations.

Yes - it's ridiculous that I could buy an i7 ten years ago, buy an i7 today, and yet - of course - they are absolutely nothing close to each other in terms of performance.

IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)

To play devil’s advocate, I can buy a Corvette today that is nothing like the one from ten years ago too.

In fact, lots of things are like this.

How much does the top speed differ?

More important than top speed, 0-60 went from 4.2 to 2.9 seconds in that time. So the analogy stands

https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content...

About 10 years ago. 7:19.63 (ZR1 / i9)

https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-s...

About a year ago 7:29.90 (base model / i3)

Better measure than top speed anyway

Corvettes like all cars are identified by their model year. Hence there is no confusion that a 2021 Corvette is "better" than a 2011 Corvette.

Are the '21 models better than an '11? I don't think anyone would say they'd rather have a '21 than a '69.

I do love collecting my old classics, but every time I'm the one driving my wife's Civic, I think, huh, everything about modern cars is better in every single way.

Including pervasive tracking of driving habits and who you associate with, sold to the highest bidder. :-(

In terms of speed, definitely - the '69 Corvette's zero-to-60 mph time was about 7 seconds, the '11 Corvette took about 4 seconds, and the '21 Corvette takes under three seconds. Sustained performance, maximum speed, etc. has also improved.

They would if they were looking for top speed.

Depends on if I have a garage and a team to keep it running good, if I'm taking it for a nice drive or just showing it off in a museum.... The long, swooping '69 is iconic, but there are lots of things to prefer about a modern model.

Almost everyone knows that the model year is part of the, idk, "minimal tuple" for identifying vehicles, though, and you can count on it always appearing in e.g. advertisements.

In CPU land, the architecture codename or process node might be part of such a "minimal tuple" but these are frequently omitted by OEMs and retailers in their advertising materials.

The point is that people think the numeral in the brand is something like a version number in which larger numerals are better. I.e., an i7 is always better than an i5 when in fact a new i5 might exceed the performance of a dated i7 for some particular metric.

Or frankly one new i5 might be powerful than a new i7 if one's a desktop or H series and the other is a Gx or U series.

2009 C6 Corvette ZR1: 0-60 in 3.3 seconds 2019 C7 Corvette ZR1: 0-60 in 3.2 seconds

I have always hated 0-60 because it depends greatly on transmission shift points, driver ability, rear end ratio, and most of all traction, which OEM street tires have little of.

Let’s go to a full quarter mile, which show a bigger difference, but again not a huge one.

2009: 11.2 seconds/130.5 mph

2019: 10.6-seconds/134 mph

This would be a better comparison of Ford Mustang GT’s of the same year. Massive improvement.

It's a crappy metric. What about:

Time to stop from 60 mph?

Effective turning radius at 60 mph?

Interior noise in decibels at 60 mph?

Maximum shock absorption at 60 mph?

Nürburgring times.

Or 0-100-0.

>> Nürburgring times.

7:06 vs 7:24 for the old car. Although in 'segmented' times it had went something like 6:54

This is valid since Intel's naming scheme is influenced by BMW.

I can't wait for Intel to release an i7 variant as the i8 Gran Coupé.

Instead they could have just called them i2017, i2018... going with year of manufacturing. That way it is useful to make some sense out of performance with an understanding iN is always better than i(N-1)

That gives you the opposite problem, where someone gets a brand new dual core and is confused by it being slower.

Best is to give them a number that approximately maps to performance.

The "pro" version might be an i8, while the budget version is i3. In a few years time, the pro version will be up to i12 while the budget version is now i8.

You have model numbers for when someone needs to look up some super specific detail.

Right. The issue I have with this is that we have i7 models that are from 5 and 10 years ago with vastly different performance due to their generation. If it was more iterative it would make more sense.

Year of manufacturing says nothing; you can have two different gens manufactured in the same year, one for lower price tier and the other for the higher one. Just like Apple still produces older iPhones, same thing.

Instead, you have designations like "Intel Core i7 8565U Whiskey Lake" or "Intel Core i7 10510U Comet Lake". The first one is 8th generation (=8xxx), the second one is 10th generation (10xxx, but the 14nm one, not the 10nm "Ice Lake"), and most OEMs do put these into their marketing materials and they are on their respective web shops (these two specifically were copied from two different Thinkpads X1 Carbon models).

Then there's the Acer way of naming products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" so that each one is unique. I like Intel's clearly defined 9 > 7 > 5 > 3. However, I do wish that Intel made the model generation part of their marketing material so that retailers and OEMs would be forced to include that information in their product marketing too. Intel i7.2019, for example.

> Then there's the Acer way of naming products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx"

This take is deceitful. Acer typically uses a very simple scheme to define their products, which goes something like "Acer <product line> <model>".

The scheme "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" is more a kin to a product ID, which goes way beyond make and model and specifies exactly which hardware combination is shipped in a particular product.

Complaining that Acer names its products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" makes as much sense as complaining that Apple names its laptops like MVFM2xx/A, which Apple uses for the same effect.

The model number is placed on the beginning of the title. Or you argue that we should call it as """ 37.5” UltraWide QHD (3840 x 1600) AMD FreeSync Monitor (USB 3.1 Type-C Port, Display Port, HDMI Port) """ ?

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-XR382CQK-bmijqphuzx-UltraWide-Fr...

WTF, XR382CQK bmijqphuzx is really the model of an Acer monitor?

This is not at all how monitor marketing works. Every company gives them insane nonsense names. There is no other identifier. for XR382CQK bmijqphuzx there is no product line or model other than "monitor". That's all you get.

> IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)

Current Pentium and Celeron chips can either be mobile variants of the Core line or... Atoms.

I have a Celeron N4100 in my cheap netbook. It's listed as "Gemini Lake" in Intel ARK, which is a rebranding of its original lineage... Goldmont. (Goldmont Plus)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_micropro...

If you were to look at other Gemini Lake cores... You'll see that "Pentium Silver" also falls into that group.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam...

TLDR: Intel has made it nearly impossible for anyone to know if they're getting Core based or Atom based mobile chips unless significant research is done beforehand.

This is not to say avoid Atoms at all costs. The N4100 I have is reasonably on par with the Core 2 Q6600 quad, which was quite the beast of a chip back in its day.

The current Atoms are nothing like the in-order-execution only monstrosities they originally launched as... but I still find Intel's branding a bit more than confusing. If incredibly deceitful.

So that OEMs can keep selling their 5 year old chip designs at the same margins while their manufacturing costs plummet.

But it's a 9.21 Jigawatt, 11 GHz, i21 processor!?

And it's cycle- and power-efficiency figures are?

Only the frequency wars ended, the marketing and features wars continue the prohibition on computer architecture enlightenment unabated.

To be fair, it's probably not the CPU that's making their computer feel slow. Most likely, the lack of SSD and small amount of RAM.

No joke. I still daily use a 2008 MacBook Pro(with a Core2Duo CPU), with an SSD and 8GB of ram and that machine is perfectly fine for what I need it for - browsing the web, replying to emails, listening to Spotify, watching YouTube/Netlix. And people have bought a 2019 iMac with a normal 1TB 5400rpm HDD(!!!!!) And complain that it's slow. Yeah, of course it is, but it has nothing to do with the CPU in there.

Yeap. It helps that Intel has missed the ball in the last 5 years or so. And tech savvy users are used to watching CPU/RAM usage, which helps a lot too.

My wife had a “my computer is slow” issue the other day. Fans blowing like crazy, extremely hot, battery draining fast. Turns out, lsof was stuck on some corrupt preferences file. Killed the process and file and all was fine. Regular people lack the tools to diagnose the problem and just deal with it, restart or buy a new one. We really should make diagnosing easier.

Replace Geek Squad with a very small (AI/ML) script.

No, seriously. Once the root cause is found, humanize the description of the problem and ask the user what they want to do about it.

Have you seen the software the Apple Genius Bar uses to troubleshoot problems? It’s all scripted out with lots of automation.

Actually, no, I never use them.

I bet they would to reduce labor costs.

Desktop Reliability Engineering ;-)

I gave a responsible, sane but poor elderly homeless guy I was acquainted with a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012), chargers, and canoeing dry bag. The MBP was originally a base 4 GiB and 500 HDD that, at some point, I upgraded to 16 and 480 SSD (OWC when it was $1.5k) + 500 HDD - optical.

OSes, platform toolchains, and apps need to prioritize UX (UI response time and time-to-first-window) to lessen the perception and the reality of waiting on apps doing unimportant activities rather than appearing and beginning interaction.

https://youtu.be/H7PJ1oeEyGg

https://web.archive.org/web/20110703091817/http://buyafuckin...

The memory hierarchy of a modern CPU with spinning rust might as well be the Parker Solar Probe waiting on a sea anemone.

I am remiss how someone these days can buy a laptop with spinning rust and 4 GiB and then complain it's "slow." Maybe they should've bought a real laptop for real work that's repairable and upgradable?

>repairable and upgradable

Unfortunately, the best ones aren't anymore.

Marketing "the best" (most expensive / newest) aren't the best, for most purposes.

I bought a T480 with dual batteries that does run for 10 hours. It has a 2 TiB SSD and 32 GiB. Works fine for me. Water-resistant, repairable, awesome keyboard, and MIL-SPEC drop rated too. Optional magnesium display top assembly cover.

Those aren't the best ones then.

Combined with generation it says plenty. It's unfortunate when the public doesn't understand. I'm not sure what should be done.

It is worth noting that if you think GPU model numbers are fine, CPUs are actually very similar. There's the 2600k, 3770k, etc. (sandy bridge and ivy bridge CPUs respectively) The first number goes up each generation and the rest is how powerful it is within the generation. Similar to Nvidia having a GTX 980 and later a GTX 1080.

I've seen the generation mentioned first in almost all places. For example https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops/xps-15-laptop/spd/xp... lists "9th generation Intel core i5". How come people pay attention to the other number more?

They pay more attention to the other number because that's how the English language works. "9th generation" is a descriptive prefix to the actual CPU model name.

I don't get why not a single brand other than Apple gets product names remotely right. Every time a relative asks me for a laptop recommendation and shows me a list of models I have absolutely no clue what to tell them. All the model numbers look like they came from a password generator and the only discernible difference without hours of looking at spec sheets is the price.

PlayStation. The name is brilliant and they’ve incremented the index each release since the first about 25 years ago.

(I know it’s a different product category. It’s relevant because it’s name and number is perfect)

Most cryptic product number for consumer product I've ever know is Acer's monitors like XF270HBbmiiprx.

I get your point and it's only 5 years but my i5-7300HQ and i7-3520M were pretty comparable due to the number of cores, despite what pure benchmark numbers would say (and I'd actually prefer that i7)

Except this is an article about the Apple MacBook Pro 16" which came out aprox. 1 year ago (edit, 1 and a half years ago).

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