Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand
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Let alone a 2009 Core i7…
Each time I spec up a new PC in line with what I want for data workloads, some spatial, and probably the odd bit of video work, I'm reminded just how expensive hardware has become.
Plus, this isn’t historically true. An Apple II cost nearly $6000 after inflation. Heck, the Atari cost nearly $1000 in today’s money. The first Macintosh cost $6500 after inflation. Commodore 64? $1670. Heck, $250 from 2014 had the buying power of $310 now. Building a $1000 computer in 2014 would cost $240 more now, and yet our parts are superbly faster.
And you can always pick up a 5-year-old PC with hardware no slower now than it was then for a few hundred bucks. It’s only expensive if you must have latest and greatest for some reason; or look at prices without considering inflation or the magnitude of the performance improvements.
Then the products inside seem to be in performance order. A 3080 is better than a 3060 is better than a 3020 (if that exists).
I know it gets messier than that. The fact that they add the titanium versions kind of screws with it. And in the last year they had that card they had to renumber because a change to its memory configuration (?) made it perform wrong for its moniker.
But at least you know a 3080 is two generations newer than a 1080. Compared to the seemingly random numbers on CPUs it’s simple.
That's similar to what Intel was doing with the numbers following the i{3,5,7,9}:
Then I stuck with AMD for a while (the HD 4870 followed by the R9 390, both were very compelling options from a $/perf standpoint when they were current from what I remember) and by the time NVidia came back on my radar again they'd gone through another whole ~10 generation cycle of 3 digit numbers and were back on the four digit ones again.
Would you like to buy my Xbox One X Box?
Why sell this generations X070 equivalent as an x070 when you can call it an x080 instead and know that a very large chunk of your customer base wont look at the actual specs before paying an extra ~$100 for it? Probably not good in the long term, but who cares about the long term when you can boost sales numbers on a new product now and make shareholders happy.
How do we account for nuances on AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm chips? Does that apply to other ARM chips?
And then there is the issue of trademark, copyright, and branding, which could get into legal struggles.
A naming scheme:
Manufacturer Code: A short abbreviation or code for the manufacturer, e.g., 'IN' for Intel, 'AMD' for AMD, 'NV' for NVIDIA, etc.
Component Type: A short abbreviation for the component type, e.g., 'CPU' for Central Processing Unit and 'GPU' for Graphics Processing Unit.
Generation: A two-digit number representing the generation of the component. For instance, '01' for the first generation, '02' for the second generation, and so on.
Performance Tier: A letter representing the performance tier of the component, with 'A' being the highest tier and 'E' being the lowest tier. This can be expanded to include more tiers as needed.
Sub-Tier: A two-digit number representing the sub-tier within the performance tier, with '01' being the highest sub-tier and '99' being the lowest sub-tier.
Examples:
IN-CPU-03-A05: This would represent an Intel third-generation CPU, in the highest performance tier (A), and positioned in the fifth sub-tier within that tier.
NV-GPU-02-C15: This would represent an NVIDIA second-generation GPU, in the middle performance tier (C), and positioned in the fifteenth sub-tier within that tier.
CPU SKUs work exactly the same way? intel has gone longer than nvidia without restarting the numbering, so they need two digits instead of one.
> intel has gone longer than nvidia without restarting the numbering, so they need two digits instead of one.
Nvidia started the current numbering with 200 almost at the same time, with the 10XX series they added a fourth digit.
The naming schemes are completely, completely, retarded but they also aren't that hard to guess
It doesn't help that there's also a random mix of river codenames and I can never keep straight which number they belong to.
Nobody is surprised that a 3-series can refer to different cars, and the exact model (E46, G20) is not mentioned in marketing.
> It doesn't help that there's also a random mix of river codenames and I can never keep straight which number they belong to.
I’ve never known codenames to do that. Plus they don’t necessarily match generations.
The codenames are hard to keep straight, especially when they started making everything a Lake, but at least you can see then list of products formerly known as X and see the whole family.
The basic process for CPU selection is pick the architecture, pick the number of cores, pick the speed tier. But none of that is clearly communicated with the model number.
Honestly, I'm somewhat convinced that Intel did this scheme intentionally to sell older hardware (hey this has an i5/'gold' too and it's slightly cheaper!), but perhaps it backfired: folks who already have an iX think that new fancy iX laptop isn't worth it.
Here's hoping there's a tell-all book in a few years with some insight.
In the grand scheme of things, it's still better than the Microsoft Xbox naming convention.
Both Gold and Celeron don't really mean anything. Celeron is often available with the same architecture as the other brands, often with less cores, maybe less speed, maybe some features disabled, but especially if you're comparing across architectures, the brand isn't important, the details are.
AMD could also do better.
I've also heard people say things like "my PC has an i7" without understanding the generational context, but the intersection between this group and the population that actually buys individual computer parts is approximately null. it's a lot harder to figure out chipset compatibility than it is to figure out that a 2700k is separated from a 13700k by more than ten years.
Since switching to laptops from building my own PCs from parts I stopped following CPU models directly. I knew i3 was "weaker" than i5, and i5 "weaker" than i7. But remember getting an "i5" 10 years and they are still selling them. Shouldn't it be up to i15 by now? It would have been better to have some suffix or prefix letters "Pro", or "Super" to indicate tiers.
On short distances, the 22kWh version is actually a bit faster because the battery is slightly lighter.
Intel’s branding was particularly bad in that i9 usually indicated higher performance than eg i3, but old i9s could be much worse than newer i7s (or even i5/3) and it was hard to distinguish them. And new i3s could be the most performant or efficient choice for some consumers over an i9 sometimes; shitty i3s made the good i3s also look bad.
It seems simple to use a naming convention embedding stuff like node/process/fab provenance, cores, clock, specialization or thermals, version… it’s a lot easier to understand basic differences between an Intel-L7n8c35H.2 (laptop, 7nm, 8 core, 3.5 GHz, version 2) and an Intel-D5n12c38H.1 even if it doesn’t capture every distinction.
I guess it's them trying to incentise buying new in an industry that's much more slow moving than PC parts.
At a glance, how is that different to relatively recent Intel i5 10030H???
i"X" is the tier, and the number after that hints at generation and rank.
There may be better ways of doing it but it isn't hard to figure out for someone who needs to know.
For the complete SKU some more jibberisch can of course be added. Like 25i7-32mg. This suffix could be generation specific though, allowing for some flexibility. Most people wouldn't need to care.
Who’s the “average” consumer here? I’m skeptical that the majority of PC buyers have internalized the “i” branding. Gamers, sure. But average consumers? I’ve talked a number of less computer savvy friends and family through computer purchases and there was awareness of Intel, but beyond that not so much.
I don’t think a rebrand is going to change much for Intel either way. Average consumers are either going to buy by price point and familiar brand (Lenovo, Dell, etc.) or phone a friend to get advice. Or use whatever they get handed by their employer.
I feel like you're either in one of two groups:
1. a PC "nerd" (kind of deragotory) who is obsessed with specs all the way down to things like L2 cache size, etc.
2. somebody who has 0 clue what any computer/laptop specification means whatsoever
Life was so easy in the MHz-wars days.
The bigger number was basically always better, and you could easily tell by how much.
Pentium III had 20% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Northwood; AMD K8 (Athlon 64) had 35% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Prescott.
Same in the RISC vs CISC days: Pentium had 33% higher IPC than the original PowerPC 601. Late generation RISCs like Alpha were a completely different beast again, with the DEC Alpha 21264 (EV6) having 25% higher IPC than Pentium III.
It was never obvious back then, and it was also never obvious since then.
IPC keeps rising among different architectures. A couple years ago Apple overtook Intel, and ARM did as well.
The P4 is what killed the MHz Wars in my memory. It was clear it couldn’t keep clicking up and it’s poor performance relative to existing chips at similar clock speeds (as you noted) meant the game was over.
Anyone can look at 17 and compare it to the number on their older computer (say Pentium 14) and know it’s better.
Apple is doing this right so far with the M chips, but they’re about to be on #3. We’ll see how long they stick with it. They have so far in phones.
These?
M1
M1 Pro
M1 Max
M1 Ultra
M2 Pro
M2 Max
You have the "MacBook Pro with M1 Pro" which makes my eyebrow twitch.
You also have the "M1 Max" which is lower grade than the "M1 Ultra". Despite it you know, being the MAX.
I will say that this branding while uncharacteristically sloppy for Apple, is better than bullshit like the "Intel Platinum i6-43065GF Extreme edition" which is simply incomprehensible to the untrained eye while the trained eyes roll in the back of their skulls.
Apple is tackling an easier problem since they're focusing on subdivisions of the high margin premium consumer segment. But there's a world of difference between the €1400 base model m1 macbook air and the €550 windows machines the standard consumer here buys. A lot of Apple's target market looks at the €1400 MBA doing quite well against comparably priced windows machines (well as long as you aren't gaming, running legacy business applications, or actually in need of more than 8gb of RAM), and sees the €950 price difference to what people actually buy as irrelevant, but for e.g. my parents that pays for their next laptop in a decade too.
Once you're into that price sensitive market, you end up needing from a business imperative that smattering of SKUs, since the person selling a €600 laptop wants something they can point to as better than the €550 laptop and at that market, people are not buying €50 for lighter or more aesthetically appealing laptops. Then a sort of mirror happens at the high end since it's users buying CPUs directly and therefore more informed so it's not as easy to just make some tiers and extract maximum consumer surplus for the higher tiers.
I’d prefer a more literate convention I described in other comments, but the new convention may at least prevent reductively bucketing skus. The old buckets were just descriptive enough to suggest a quality and performance hierarchy, but dangerously so, because even a 3 could be better than a 9 in some cases.
Except actually Celeron was entry level, and i3 was entrish-level. Also i7 wasn't enthusiast, no you needed an i9 processor to be a REAL enthusiast. Also now mainstream tasks can run just fine on the i3's if not the Celeron chips.
I long thought their branding was over-convoluted MBA mess which was overdue for some simplification.
I understand that an i5 is better than an i3 and worse than an i7.
Outside of that I’m totally lost. Different core counts, different kinds of cores, multiple clock speeds (minimum, normal, max, ultra-boost), etc. and of course a current i3 probably destroys an older i7 in benchmarks.
GPUs aren’t quite as bad. A 3060 is better than a 2060, but is a 3060 better than a 2080ti?
But I find CPUs (when I see model numbers mentioned) totally inscrutable.
I don’t know if the i-series names are valuable. The last Intel name I really remember is the Core 2 Duo name. i3 is no where near as memorable.
Whatever they do, I hope they find a way to make their various lines and models easier to understand. I know that’s difficult for a company like Intel with such a huge line up of products.
That isn't always true. It's pushed by intel as a "handy reference" for specifications, when it's actually just a price bracket. Many noobs will see it as a three-level hierarchy and conclude that they need an i7 for their mundane office work, when a pentium would have sufficed.
You gotta read and understand the specifications.
AMD has an actually useful naming spec for their processors, unlike intel.
There's no way this is true. The iNumbers were never used consistently enough to mean anything.
i3: single core, hyperthreading
i5: multi core, no hyperthreading
i7: multi core, hyperthreading
It only jumped the shark once hyperthreading stopped being a differentiating feature, and Intel tried to retcon equivalent performance levels into their previous numbering system.
Edit: Nehalem (~2008). Apparently i3 didn't exist until the Westmere die shrink?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture)
And they didn't even have an i3 model. What you refer to as the i3 above was still branded as "Celeron". The immediate successor (Westmere) didn't follow this convention at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmere_(microarchitecture)
All of the i3 and i5s of that generation were MC+SMT.
Hindsight is 20/20, so I see how Intel ~2008 could have thought "Maybe SMT will fail in real world scenarios, so we don't want it on our entire product line."
But at some point relatively soon after that it was clear that SMT worked well and they could cram it into every chip.
That's when they really should have ditched the i* and converted to a new system.
The first two generations of core processors had a different pattern, but those were "core [2] solo/duo/quad", they had no i and no tier numbers.
(And before that was pentium 4/D.)
Nehalem desktop had: Celeron P1053 (1 core HT), i5 750/760 (4 core no HT), i7 860-960 (4 core HT)
Westmere desktop had: Pentium/Celeron G59XX/G1101 (2 core no HT), i3 530-560 (2 core HT), i5 650-680 (2 core HT), i7 970-980 (6 core HT)
Links in sibling post above.
So really... the HT / no HT really only lasted one release (Nehalem), and that didn't even have an i3.
But those Celerons are simply a different product line. I'm pretty sure they never released an i processor with less than 2 cores and 4 threads.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/platforms/d...
I lost count at 75 SKUs for Cascade Lake. Do we need 2-core increments? Do we need 0.2 GHz increments? Is this just part of the binning process? Wouldn't it make it easier for everyone if they had 1/4 the amount?
I'm trying to think of the amount of manhours wasted in meetings where IT staff debate 16-core vs 18-core and 20-core, alonge with 2.1GHz vs 2.3Ghz and 2.5GHz, when all the CPU's are within $100 of each other.
I think back to the Pentium days when you'd only have a handful of clockspeeds and then something new (like MMX), or a new socket would come out and then you'd get a couple more chips.
You don't even need me to answer.
A race to the bottom but also a race to the top, and requirements to re-shape what those brands mean as they reach to those segments. Definitely an issue for a luxury brand, too.
Really bizarre practice that doesn't actually make it easier for the consumer, as the year of release becomes the number instead.
I personally never understood why they didn’t spread it to all their lines. Their GPU line could have been the G3, G5, and G7; SSDs could have been S3, S5, and S7; Wi-Fi could have been W3, W5, and W7; and Chipsets could have been C3, C5, and C7. Oh well…
Meanwhile, enthusiasts will roll their eyes and use whatever dumb naming scheme Intel replaces it with. It was terribly convoluted before, and it will certainly be terribly convoluted after. This is a non-event.
If I were branding chips I’d do some combination of core count, clock speed (yes I know performance is much more complicated), chip type/power requirements/specialization, and iteration. Like I have no idea how to compare an i3-4971058373 to an i7-5927263849. I can much more easily compare an i6L-36v2 (six core, 3.6 GHz, laptop thermals/power, second version) to an i8D-38v1. And even more importantly I can seek out SKUs according to my requirements rather than having to go through multiple third party websites doing the work of cataloguing/comparing specs and explaining wtf each sku is.
If you define 'ordinary people' as people who don't know what CPU their PC has you'll be right. But I generally I'd assume most people who buy their devices themselves might have some understanding about i3 < i5 < i7
For some workloads, it's one; for others, it's the other.
A one-dimensional performance axis is hard in practice.
Intel-$singlecore-$multicore
So an Intel-6-12 had twice the single core performance of the Intel-3-48 but is much worse in multicore.
Yeah, things are WAY more complicated. But at least it gives you a chance without memorizing spec sheets first. Higher numbers are always better. No redefining. This year’s 5 can’t be better than last year’s 20 in performance.
I don’t follow Intel/AMD chips anymore. If I wanted to buy a computer I’d have to learn it all from scratch. This would give me a nice leg up.
There will be power specs, and igpu specs, and ecc, and so on. It's hard to capture succinctly.
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
-Seymour Cray
As usual, Apple does it so much better. It’s just a MacBook Air, except in the documentation it’s “Macbook Air Late 2019” except when you ask the machine itself it uses yet another name.
These words have lost all meaning. No its not just Intel, its literally every single consumer cpu and gpu maker.
As someone who keeps tabs on the products I can pretty quickly get an intuition for what they mean, but the semantics do no favors. They're just placeholders for 'better' and 'best' when used in various combinations. But once you stop labeling the base model (such as plainly 'Macbook') you're not qualifying what the marketing term is trying to convey (what is it 'better' than?). 'Air' as opposed to...? 'Pro' compared to...a product you no longer sell? 'Ultra' or 'Plus' for phones but 'Pro' for desktop OSs?
If you tried to chart out the marketing terms used in the tech hardware industry it would look like the Always Sunny Charlie Conspiracy meme.
It seems that marketing executives have forgotten that part of their jobs is to ensure that they communicate product qualities accurately to consumers.
Google is one of the worst offenders in this, with their madness over naming. Is Nexus 5X an earlier version of Nexus 6? No? It denotes the size of the screen? What exactly is a Pixel? Phone? Tablet? Notebook? What does Chromecast have to do with Chrome?
I always though Intel is a close second. There can be better names for Intel processor lines:
i3: Mobile
i5: Balanced
i7: Professional
i9: Creative/Graphics
There may be better approximations of course. But ideally if a product is targetted at a segment, it should be made clear in the brand name. Generations can be mentioned as suffix: p13 would be 13th generation of Professional, m5 would be 5th generation of mobile.
Apple does a good job of this with their Mac lines:
Air: Ultraportable
Pro: Creatives/Professional users
M1, M2 etc: higher is always better.
People don't want to feel ripped off, so I am sure that the clear communication from the Apple marketing team provides a significant tailwind to their sales team.
Simple really.
M 1 Pro
^ ^ ^
Form Gen Intra-gen
Factor Differentiator
i5 10 700k
^ ^ ^
Bracket Gen In gen differentiatoriSheeple usually compare M1 and M2 laptops with Apple's old Intel based laptops and not with current Intel and AMD mobile processors - which are completely competitive in terms of performance.
It's also that Intel laptops are pretty trash in general especially at equivalent price points vs what apple offers. Not everyone needs or wants it all buy you want really good quality, screen/keyboard/trackpad build quality/acoustics apple is pretty much the only choice out there.
cringes
You had some credibility up until then...