Hacker News Reader

Comment by Infernal | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the real issue here with Intel is they got it backwards. Nvidia leads with the generation (2xxx, 3xxx) and then differentiates within the generation (xx60, xx80). Intel leads with the intra-gen differentiation (i5, i7 etc.) which is most often included in marketing, with the generation buried in the particular CPU model number that often isn't included (10xxx, 11xxx).

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.

View on HN

Intel gets more confusing when you include the Pentium and Celerons. There, they have different leading numbers for generations compared to the iX. And if you get mobile chips, you've got trailing suffixes like U and H? that indicate a 'core series' cpu, and leading prefixes like N that indicate a 'atom series' cpu.

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.

Let's not forget what they started calling 'gold', which in many cases is just Celeron+. But don't confuse that with 'silver', designed for ultralight computing.

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.

> Let's not forget what they started calling 'gold', which in many cases is just Celeron+. But don't confuse that with 'silver', designed for ultralight computing.

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.

In other words, "middle endianness".

Meh. The I is the segment, the is the generation, then the actual part with the generation.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com