Intel To Drop the 'i' Moniker In Upcoming CPU Rebrand (theregister.com) 107
When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, the company may drop its iconic "i" CPU branding and add a new moniker. Chipzilla today told The Register "We are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks." From the report: The Register asked Intel about branding after semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel on Monday tweeted "Imagine you're losing market share when you've been monopoly for decades, and your bright idea is to burn all brand recognition to the ground!" "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!"
Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme."
Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".
Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme."
Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".
Dear Intel... (Score:1, Insightful)
Melt calling your CPUs Pro, Max and Ultra will not make them use a smaller process or be power-efficient like Apple's processors.
Sincerely yrs,
A. Coward
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There is no I in Three, Five or Seven.
You sure about that?
Exciting changes (Score:5, Funny)
I assume that whoever wrote that copy has such a low threshold for excitement that they find being stuck in a traffic jam thrilling.
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I assume that whoever wrote that copy has such a low threshold for excitement that they find being stuck in a traffic jam thrilling.
The sarcasm flew over your head.
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It seems like marketing genius to me.
First give up the "i" because Apple owns it now.
Then replace it with "Ultra" which Apple also owns.
I'm not sure what "brand equity" is being lost here.
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Then replace it with "Ultra" which Apple also owns.
Konami: Hold my beer.
Re:Exciting changes (Score:5, Informative)
To be honest, within the context, it still does sound a lot like deadpan sarcasm, even if it doesn't come from the author of the article. And the funny thing to me is thinking about that little bit of sarcasm flying over the head of whoever approved of that statement being released to the press at Intel.
Chipzilla = Intel (for those who are not familiar with the nickname)
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They just spend too much time on LinkedIn. Everything is exciting there. Also humbling.
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It's corporate speak, and way overused. It was the same in my previous company, everything is "exciting", everyone is "excited" to tell you about it, which just means nothing is exciting, it's meaningless.
No Reason? Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!"
The one claiming this is being done for "no reason" fails to understand how confusing the marketing was before:
"They’ve got nothing to do with the number of cores in each CPU nor the speed of each. Intel’s Core i7 CPUs don’t have seven cores nor do Core i3 have three cores. Which family an Intel Core CPU falls into is based on a collection of criteria involving their number of cores, clock speed (in GHz) and cache size..."
A "collection of criteria" sounds like what you would need to qualify to live in Martha's Vineyard. Forget the Celeron confusion, the hell does that even mean to nerds trying to spec a CPU?
TL; DR - When a mega-vendor feels the need to re-brand after many years, it's usually because the bullshit isn't selling anymore.
Re:No Reason? Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
The marketing isn't what was so confusing before. Intel's bewildering array of products, with minute gradations in order to finely slice the market based on price sensitivity, is what is so confusing. They have 21 different "11th Gen Core i7" processors, and 24 different "11th Gen Core i5" processors, plus 8 at the i9 trim level and 9 at the i3 level. Just at the i7 level, you can have 4 or 8 cores; and 12, 18 or 24 MB of last level cache; in addition to however many CPU speeds. And that is just the higher-end desktop/laptop segment -- servers and low-power processors are even more different.
I very much doubt Intel will change the substance of their approach to product lines, so they will inevitably make them just differently confusing.
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While their product line is needlessly convoluted, their marketing makes things more confusing.
They emphasize, first and foremost, the 'stratum' of the desktop processor. Their marketing has a focus on 'Look at the i5', with nothing in the branding to distinguish 2009 from 2023. The generation is tucked away into an unwieldy 5 digit number that no one really feels like thinking, which can be somewhat separate from the number (3, 5, 7, 9) in the 'i' designation.
Seems most marketing folks consider 4 digits
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AMD basically copied Intel's branding for the CPU market. A Ryzen 5 7600 CPU is the 7th generation (ok 7th newness level) of the 5-level of performance.
Re:No Reason? Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
The marketing isn't what was so confusing before. Intel's bewildering array of products, with minute gradations in order to finely slice the market based on price sensitivity, is what is so confusing. They have 21 different "11th Gen Core i7" processors, and 24 different "11th Gen Core i5" processors, plus 8 at the i9 trim level and 9 at the i3 level. Just at the i7 level, you can have 4 or 8 cores; and 12, 18 or 24 MB of last level cache; in addition to however many CPU speeds. And that is just the higher-end desktop/laptop segment -- servers and low-power processors are even more different.
On the other hand, what can you do when there's so much stuff crammed into modern processors, and you have to bin them based on what passed QA after manufacture without throwing too many away? If your "Super" line of processors has 4 cores and 12MB of cache, and your "Uber" line has 8 and 24MB, you're going to end up with 6-core with 24MB, 8-core with 18MB, etc. after binning - now what do you call those? Calling them "Trash" just because it makes your branding complicated will only get you kicked out by your investors.
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On the other hand, what can you do when there's so much stuff crammed into modern processors, and you have to bin them based on what passed QA after manufacture without throwing too many away?
You make fewer bins, and more of your customers have the potential to gain from the overclocking game. Do you make less money by not creating those intermediate products, and pricing them slightly higher? That depends on volume, and what they ultimately wind up selling for. If you make it so confusing that people are only buying a subset of your parts that they understand, actually encounter in the real world or whatever, then you're going to wind up having to discount stock and you won't make any more mone
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Some of it should just stay off the consumer market altogether. Like the $200 HP laptops in recent years with a Passmark score of about 600 compared to a 12 year old i3-2100 that is almost 4x faster.
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Yeah, that's bananas. I got a Ryzen 3 HP laptop for $300 that's slightly faster than the Mobile Core i7 something-or-other in my lady's Toshiba Lifebook T900, which is much older, and was $900 used. Intel should just admit they can't make a competitive low end CPU.
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I know long ago, that's how the CPU market worked. They would test each one, and then market it based on which tests passed, blowing internal fuses to disable parts that failed. I'm not at all clear on to what extent that's true today. I would suspect that their failure rate is low enough now that most chips pass all the tests, so if multiple bins come off the same line, they're just blowing internal fuses for marketing reasons, not technological reasons.
The Intel line has been ridiculously complex:
Celer
Keep it simple: Name, grade, vintage (Score:1)
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That's pretty good, but they've tarnished the Celeron and Pentium brands by putting them at the bottom. And they don't want to make mobile chips look bad. So I would tweak that and use "Core" instead of "Pentium" or "Celeron."
The big downside is that this means they really need a new release every year whether they have something ready or not. Soon it will be like auto manufacturers where you get the new model year starting in August for back-to-school sales.
On the other hand, using the year means everyo
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AMD addressed that problem with chiplets. Instead of one monolithic CPU die, they have multiple sub-modules that all sit on a substrate together. They even use different processes for different parts, so parts where performance isn't so critical can use an older and cheaper process, with the sensitive parts getting the smallest, most efficient possible transistors.
If one particular chiplet fails they are not forced to make a lower end CPU out of it, they can discard it. Of course it's not perfect and they d
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I don't mind the number of bins so much, but for the server SKUs:
* Numbering doesn't necessarily map well across generations
* The letter suffixes are confusing and sometimes misleading. With Sapphire Rapids, only a few SKUs are labeled as general purpose, so one often goes to a SKU that in theory is "optimized" for some purpose. Though at least through Icelake, the SKUs with a suffix weren't necessarily even the best at a given role. So perhaps excluding the high-temperature SKUs, in practice don't we en
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It's all the same processor. The slices just correspond to which performance and QA tests the same processor failed.
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Trying to sell them on AMD quite good mobile options is even harder.
And I too do blame Intel's marketing there as well, or perhaps blaming system builders that use Intel for just advertising them as an "Intel i7 processor
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Intel's naming of consumer oriented parts is really stupid.
Consider this post an ACK
but nobody was ever going put i7-[0-9]{4,5}[ A-Z] in ad copy for a complete system because there was basically no change the person looking at it would know what it means. I don't know what they mean without consulting wikipedia, and I might be considered an 'enthusiast'. Its way to complicated a scheme. Never mind they reused names old marketing names, that used to be flagship products like 'Pentium' to denote bottom drawer
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They gotta be able to bin these parts. Only 4 core work on this one, the 512-bit vector operations cant be used on this one, this one fails at lower voltage than hoped for,
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To use a car analogy;
I look at it as a BMW, with the 3,4, and 7 Series cars, along with the various trim packages and options available for each.
In the case of your customer with the older i7, it would be like explaining the difference between their 2003 735 base model and a 2023 550 xDrive.
It may not make it any less confusing to most people, but I can see how the Marketing folks might think this way.
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For CPUs we don't even use any general metric to characterize their performance. For GPUs we have the FLOPS metric, which is also somewhat misleading as it is a mostly synthetic number that is not analogous to "car numbers" like wattage or torque, but still it's something that combines clocks, IPC, and the number of processing units with which general performance does scale.
T
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For CPUs we don't even use any general metric to characterize their performance.
I've personally settled on Passmark scores on the cpubenchmark.net site. It's been pretty reliable and there always seems to be data available by the time the product is on shelves.
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For my purposes though it's not nuanced enough for CPU applications. For example when I look at the current https://www.cpubenchmark.net/s... [cpubenchmark.net] Single Threat charts it tells me that the i9-13900KS is at the top with 4797 points. But when I look up the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which I know to be very good at typical single threaded applications in gaming I only find it with 3797 points.
This suggests to me that Passmark's
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I get those eyebrow raising moments at times when I tell a customer that the CPU of their notebook is just too old, then recommend something new and affordable with a modern i5 and then they tell me "but it's an i7" as if that means something when the CPU generations are a decade apart.
Starting to wonder if all those damn car analogies IT nerds are addicted to, are having some noticeable side effects on the layman.
Example: No one believes the "V8" muscle under the hood, would ever be considered slow no matter when it was made. And in many cases, that assumption holds true. Unfortunately, people are assuming the same about "i7" muscle under the keyboard bought years ago.
(Here I am questioning IT professionals for car analogies while carmakers still use horses to advertise engine power...
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Things change rather quickly in the world of electronics and software compared to something more basic as cars.
I'm fairly certain that there's car aficionados out there who would strongly disagree with me here and could tell me about the nuances. But to me, I could still use a 50 year old pickup truck to go for groceries that'll last me a while with only a single trip. A new pickup truck might do that at a mu
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At this point, their Core iWhatever marketing bullshit is so old that is probably working against them. There are probably a lot of people out there who think that they have a "fast" Core i7 processor in their PC because it has something like a Core i7 2600K in it. That's a 12 year old processor that would get curb stomped by a modern day Core i3. With a model number like a Core i3 12100F, the much newer processor probably sounds inferior to people who aren't in the industry. I mean, 7 is better than 3 and
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Since 99% of consumers don't know (and don't care) about the intimate details of their CPU, perhaps it's time to go with a much simpler approach.
Sell consumers a "2022" model year processor. That way, when the neighbor starts bragging about his 2023 model, the narcissist-designed market can benefit from it as designed.
As well as entire countries that survive off narcissistic levels of spending.
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Honestly, once we got past 386 SX and DX, to 486, things got very misty for me with regards to their CPU line up. Pentium started out okay, but quickly got confusing. There seem (to me) to be multiple competing "strands" of product, each with it's own naming and numbering which make very little sense to me.
There's nothing wrong with (say) having a server line, a desktop line, a small factor line or whatever. To some extent they have (Xeon, i-whatever and Atom), but inside those, I couldn't tell you which is
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CPUs used to be classified by megahertz and not much else. You bought a Pentium 75/90/100 and in 6 months time there was a Pentium 120/133/166. Then the Pentium 2 300-500, Pentium 3 up to 1GHz... Pentium 4... But when the MHz just wouldn't scale anymore it was rather difficult for their marketing. Now instead of isolated incidents of SX/DX or Celeron, now you had to know that a Pentium-D with 2 cores and no hyperthreading was faster than a regular Pentium 4 with hyper threading. And that a Core 2 Duo was fa
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Things went to hell with GHz representing speed about the time of the P4, which ran maybe half the speed of a PIII and IIRC, an Athlon was even faster per GHz. So given a choice of a 2GHz P4, a 1.2Ghz PIII or 1Ghz Athlon, it became non-obvious that the fastest CPU was the Athlon and the slowest was the P4. Sorta like comparing RPM's and only RPM's in cars while ignoring engine size.
I remember swapping out a 2.8GHz P4D for a 1.86GHz C2D and being amazed how much faster the C2D was on the same motherboard etc
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Anyway the relevant brand here is "Intel". Even if you know nothing about computers, and think i3 is a new BMW model, you probably know Intel and it's stock ticker.
I think having a 3/5/7-series is useful to roughly and immediately determine where a chip falls in the lineup. Add in a model year (or "generation"), and you can get a vague idea of how the chips compare, without delving into actual specifications.
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Especially true when the "laptop version" of the same i7 CPU is much crappier than the real one. Since they started pulling that it's all just marking BS to me. Really the only difference is i7 and above = hyperthreading, the rest needs to be compared by the numbers.
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Plus there's all the people who will upgrade because the new branded CPU is clearly "newer" since it doesn't have the "i" prefix. It's a clear indicator of what's new gen vs. what's old gen. It was very difficult to understand the differences between an i7 gen 10 and gen 11, especially considering some gen 10 were stronger than some gen 11 depending on cache size, number of cores, etc.
Remember IHOP rebranding.... (Score:3)
Re: Remember IHOP rebranding.... (Score:2)
Yeah, who wants to eat at HOP?
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If you're talking about the iHOB think I pretty sure that was an intentional marketing stunt - much like M&M's "retiring" the spokescandies.
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The product rebranding doesn't matter as long as their communication and evidence about its technical features and performance is accurate.
Intel has the problem that their numbers are confusing because there are so many of them. When it was just the 286 through 486 there was relatively little to keep track of, and even then people were confused about the differences between the different chips with their different buses and multipliers. They created this problem by having so many different parts.
It's not an easy problem to solve, either. If you actually wanted to get all the immediately relevant information into the part number it would have t
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Even in this era that you look a bit fondly upon:
For the 386 the SX vs DX differentiation was between a 16-bit memory bus and a 32-bit memory bus.
For the 486 the SX vs DX differentiation was between whether or not you got an on-die math coprocessor.
Intel has always done this dumbass shit because it happens over many years and fuckups will be fuckups.
I can see where this came from⦠(Score:4, Funny)
Deep in the bowels of a fading Santa Clara office.
Pat: Appleâ(TM)s Pro/Max/Ultra chips are eating our lunch! What is going on! We used to be the best microprocessor company on the planet! Fix this! Now!
Extra #1: We still are the best! I refuse to look at anything outside these walls and our internal benchmarks show weâ(TM)re beating everyone!
Extra #2: Getting on top again will require fundamental rethinking of our designs, manufacturing, corporate structure, entirely new interactions with every hardware and software company weâ(TM)ve ever spoken with, and lots of hard work. Years if not decades of hard work.
Pat: What youâ(TM)re describing is a completely new company!
Marketing #1: Its simple. You want your own Pro/Max/Ultra thingamabobs⦠Rename our products Pro/Max/Ultra and youâ(TM)re done. No need to do anything else!
Pat: Sold! I just found my new head of engineering! Now please go fix our manufacturing problem!
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Apple were ahead of everyone for a single Intel generation, but they aren't anymore. Check recent benchmarks and 13th gen Intel CPUs are ahead by a margin.
Best at what? Performance per Watt is what Apple is beating the crap out out of Intel these days. I still have to see a benchmark that states otherwise.
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And for at least 90% of users, a Core i5 is overkill. It's more about memory bandwidth and SSD bandwidth for instant startup. Apple still wins. It's not just because Intel isn't playing in the SoC game, it's because they're still using a bigger process than AMD or Apple that produces more heat.
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That's mostly because of Intel's crap process though. If you compare Apple to AMD, AMD offers nearly as much battery life and significantly more performance.
Intel's fabrication tech just sucks. AMD doesn't even have to copy the performance/efficiency core set-up that both Apple and Intel use to get competitive power efficiency.
UltraSPARC, HyperSPARC, SuperSPARC (Score:2)
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Nobody in the industry who was specifying and purchasing Sun hardware didn't know the difference, so in that regard it worked out just fine.
The fact that HyperSPARC beat the pants off buying your CPUs from Sun wasn't great for them, though.
What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote: "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition..."
Nope, the "i" in i386 (80386), i486 (80486), i586 (Pentium), i686 (Pentium Pro) and i786 (Pentium 4) have BRAND recognition.
The "i" in i3, i5 and i7 means "you don't have a f*cking idea what this is and which CPU is faster than the other and, wait, in the specs we will crop the information as to make this even harder, and wait, we will change the CPU architecture while maintaining the "i" name, you s*cker!"
So, nope, i3, i5 and i7 are not a brand recognition I would like to have. To me the "i" in those means "inferno level".
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Intel's i# system worked well if you had a basic level of intelligence.
No, it didn't. Last season's i7 is slower than the next season's i5, and if you don't know what year the old system was released and it's still on the floor you could buy it by accident. You have to look the processors up to know which ones are faster if you don't know when they came out. That's crap.
It was so good AMD basically ripped it off to with their R3/R5/R7 product designation.
It's irritating there, too.
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Quote: "Intel's i# system worked well if you had a basic level of intelligence."
Sorry, I'm not lowering myself to yours. Your ignorance about the WHOLE i3, i5, i7 an i9 (that you include) CPUs is SO AMUSING, it's to be pitied.
I can give you i3 that are faster than i7, I can give you i7 that suffer from SPECTRE and other that don't, I can give you i7 that are slower than i5 but faster than i3, I can give you i5 with slower performance in some code than the i5 released 4 years early, etc.
So, no, the one that
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i3 was good for entry level PC users who mainly wanted to run a web browser and a few light applications. i5 was for mainstream users that wanted a bit more oomph to run games, but weren't going to do so on a top-end GPU. i7 was for high-end users that wanted to make sure their expensive GPU wasn't getting bottlenecked or who were running an application that could tax a CPU.
Not even remotely correct. Even within a generation there are i5s which outperform i7s, not even in edge cases but in general cases too. And that's before you consider intergenerational models which are sold concurrently.
When you consider certain cases AMD suffers from this problem as well. Got a single threadded workload? A Ryzen 5 5600X will outperform a Ryzen 7 5700X
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and i786 (Pentium 4) have BRAND recognition
Actually this is the first time I've heard an i786 and I owned multiple Pentium 4s.
Been there, Done that (Score:2)
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Intel's Core branding has alway been weird (Score:2)
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Hand waving (Score:2)
I find this "re-branding" akin to companies that just do random staff re-orgs occasionally to obfuscate the fact that they have no consistent strategy. Surely, this latest new/shiny strategy will improve things...we just need time for it to be implemented." Rinse. Repeat.
I expected more from Pat.
Or they could be trying to make it more clear... (Score:2)
This could make it easier to compare CPUs directly, if they do it right
Patel has a dumb take. (Score:2)
Dilbert Comic (Score:2)
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you have to link the page, when you link the comic you get hit with no hotlinking
unless you were just trying to show what fucking up looks like, which does fit intel's situation pretty well
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Some browser extensions will spoof the HTTP referer, and the hotlink will actually work.
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Maybe I'll track one down when there's something funnier or more important than Dilbert at stake.
I blame it on the Pentium (Score:2)
186, 286, 386, 486 then the Pentium (Pent means 5 for 586). Then the Pentium 2,3,4,D, Core, Core 2, then the i series First - Eleventh generation.
Just call it the 2286 and make everyone happy. Besides the bigger the number the better the CPU is, at least to the general public.
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They blew it with the equivalent naming for 686 - It would have been the Sexium. Like how can't you market that name??!
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Not like Apple and VMWare did not do it.
ESXi - ee-sex-y sure they really wanted us to annuciate E-ehss-EX-eye - right...
OSX - Ohh-ehss-Ex no OSex.. sure right..
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Or even better: Window Sex Pee ;)
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An appropriate new logo (Score:2)
Let me guess ... the "i" will be replaced with a stylish arrow pointing downward, to reflect Intel's stock price and revenues.
Anyway ... the current name is not so important. (Score:1)
Right now, I am working on a notebook with an i5 and 32GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64). And this machine works better than the same brand with an i7, because both are notebooks, and when the i7 uses more power, the CPU is forced to reduce the speed to save power and reduce heat, while the i5 is happy working at nominal speed. So ... why the extra $$$ for the i7?
At the end those iX just say that the chip have more or less inactive processing units inside. You must deal also with another number and a gene
complex problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Terribad idea (Score:2)
Instructions unclear, proceeding to buy AMD CPU
will they come in different colors like yellow? (Score:2)
They already ruined the branding with the i- monik (Score:2)
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Rebranding? (Score:2)
Not a problem. Now you'll have to excuse me. My flight on a 737-8 is about to board.
It's full of MEH! (Score:1)
Apparently Intel has ceased being able to innovate.
So now they're going to simply release the same chips with new names every 12-24 months!
Isn't that GREAT?
*sigh*
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This is a good marketing move (Score:2)
Gonna one up amd (Score:2)
I cast my prediction as.
X, but at the start of the name!
Ha take that AMD. (I'll still be buying AMD thanks, well who knows when I have to buy a new motherboard, but more than likely).
Does anybody remember Inprise Corporation? (Score:1)
No, of course, you don't!
In 1998, Borland was in serious trouble. Their "solution" was to rename the company to "Inprise". The result? People assumed Borland had gone bankrupt. Two years later, it was renamed back to "Borland", but the damage was done. By 2015, all remaining product lines had been bought out (and a rebrand of the buyer happened as well, now it's "OpenText").
Now Big Fruit will trademark a single letter (Score:2)
if you use it, now Apple will sue the crap out of you...
iPhone
iPad
iCloud
iKnow
iSlam --> uh oh, infringement?
I'd love to see that go to court
Fluffy nomenclature (Score:2)
Example: Intel "Core Ultra 5 1003H". That's Core, Ultra, 5, 1003, and H. That's too fluffy. A mix of multiple full words alongside numbers and letters is fluff. Throwing in in "Ultra" for what has traditionally been the mainstream/midlevel i5 is even fluffier.
It's much less fluffy--and even perhaps more intuitive--to use simple numbers and letters. For example, back in the day, it was as simple as "Pentium 75" and only as complicated as "P54C", "P54CQS", and "P55C" in the worst case.
Maybe everything should just be called Pentium... (Score:2)
As Weird Al says, It's All About the Pentiums:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]