Intel Dropping Pentium Brand

Devistater writes "After changing their logo from 'Intel Inside' to 'Leap Ahead,' (and attempting to explain why 2006 is a leap year), Intel has now decided to drop the Pentium brand. Instead of an 'Intel Pentium 4 Dual core' you will be now be purchasing an 'Intel D 840.' You can see the intial steps of this move on Dell's desktop lineup. On the heels of the news of AMD outselling Intel in Desktop Retail sales for two consecutive months, is it really wise to change the logo to something that has no inherent brand identification, and to drop the incredibly recognizable 'Pentium'?"

Re:It's OK to drop Pentium

[SpinJaunt]

Not that AMD are going to be any better when it comes to DRM, they also have plans to include DRM into their CPU's sometime in the future.

Re:Smart

[ceeam]

Idiot. Athlon64/Sempron64 lines are on average about 4-5x times more power/heat efficient than comparable PIV/Celeron CPUs. That's under full load. On idle AMD cpus use even less (CnQ and all that). Also - due to on-chip memory controllers in AMD cpus, north bridges are basically absent on socket754/socket939 mobos which helps reduce overall power consumption / heat build-up in your computer case.

Re:Smart

[xtracto]

Yes mods, feel free to mod down this Troll.

As you can see Here [gen-x-pc.com]:

Thermal Design Power (Max):

AMD Athlon XP: 76.8W vs Intel Pentium 4: 82.0W
AMD Athlon 64 FX-51: 89W vs Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 93.9W

Capish?

I pronounce you, the Troll of the day ..

Troll

Re:Misconception.

[catisonh]

...and lets not forget that the mobile CPU in the Centrino package is a 'Celeron M'...

Actually, can we forget this? Intel [intel.com] puts Pentium M's into the Centrino, NOT Celeron M. I don't know where you heard that, but you're a lowsy nerd.

Re:Misconception.

[maxume]

lets not forget that the mobile CPU in the Centrino package is a 'Celeron M' - which in its self

Are you sure? Check it out:

http://indigo.intel.com/compare_cpu/default.aspx?f amilyid=2&culture=en-US [intel.com]
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20 040105comp.htm [intel.com]

Classically, the celeron has always been a pentium with some of the cache neutered away. I don't really follow the cpu market, so grain of salt and all that, but it appears to still be the case that the Celeron(and Celeron M) is the 'value' edition. As far as Centrino goes, it is just a really great marketing initiative to create consumer demand for intel chipsets and wireless products.

Re:Smart

[evilviper]

Thermal Design Power (Max):

AMD Athlon XP: 76.8W vs Intel Pentium 4: 82.0W

Although CnQ (Cool and Quiet) has completely reversed the situation, 32-bit Athlons did deserve their reputations for being hot.

When it was P3 vs Athlon, the Athlons were clearly much hotter, although they did have better performance. When it came to P4 vs Athlon, the situation got more complex.

Although Pentium 4s have a peak heat/power rating higher than any Athlon, AMD made a huge mistake with the Athlons, and make their chips unable to idle when recieving a HLT, unless the northbridge was disconnected, requiring motherboards to be more advanced, and causing a great deal of problems. So, practically no motherboards included S2K Bus Disconnect support, as it is called, until quite recently. The point being that AMD cpus would only vary perhaps 5watt from idle to max load (staying right at that 76w mark) whereas an idle Pentium 3/4 would drop down to a tiny fraction of its maximum power when not maxed-out.

What's more, motherboards that implimented S2K support did a pretty crappy job of it, in order to prevent any possible hardware problems. So while a Pentium 4 system can drop down below 50% of it's max power draw when idle, I haven't yet seen an Athlon system that could do so.

As I said, CnQ has completely reversed this, not only FINALLY giving AMD decent power management, but also putting them far, far ahead of Intel (and VIA) now. My point is simply that comparing only their "thermal design power" numbers is very, very misleading.

Re:Logo change will be forgotten in a few years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is being smart by dropping the Pentium trademark. The rationale is to tie together all of their brands with "Intel", rather than have several successful albeit independent trademarks from a consumers point of view.

This will further(1) increase Intels value as a trademark and will be very beneficial from a marketing point of view (all of the products will benefit from a single trademark's value).

Picture that in the future you will not be buying a Pentium, an Itanium, a Xeon or a VIIV. You will be buying an Intel D processor, and Intel Itanium, an Intel VIIV computer, etc.

(1) Apparently, Intel is one of the top 5 most recognizable trademarks worldwide, along with the likes of Coca-Cola and General Electric.