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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess it's them trying to incentise buying new in an industry that's much more slow moving than PC parts.
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.
At a glance, how is that different to relatively recent Intel i5 10030H???
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"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.