Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

boringtextreviews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 142 posts

Re: Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

#11

Post by MBCook »

I’ve been out of the enthusiast game since the P4.

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.

Re: Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

#12

Post by gjsman-1000 »

klodolph wrote: post #6

I do think the i3/i5/i7/i9 monikers are actually pretty confusing, just speaking as someone who has been using computers much longer than the brand existed. Problem is that a CPU from 2009 is going to be called an “i5” and there are just so many people who say they have an “i5” or “i7” without knowing what generation it is from.

This is especially true after the last few years of CPU innovation. A 2023 Core i3-13100 beats a 2018 Core i7-8700K, at least in Passmark, in single and multi.

Let alone a 2009 Core i7…

Re: Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

#15

Post by MBCook »

klodolph wrote: post #6

I do think the i3/i5/i7/i9 monikers are actually pretty confusing, just speaking as someone who has been using computers much longer than the brand existed. Problem is that a CPU from 2009 is going to be called an “i5” and there are just so many people who say they have an “i5” or “i7” without knowing what generation it is from.

I kind of like what Nvidia has been doing in GPUs. They have series. 1000s, 2000s, 3000s. Each generate is a new series.

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.

Re: Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

#16

Post by deaddodo »

ethbr0 wrote: post #10
internet2000 wrote: post #5

> The “i” branding is extremely powerful with the average consumer and removing it is bound to cause confusion amongst consumers who aren’t technically-inclined. There's no way this is true. The iNumbers were never used consistently enough to mean anything.

When they were first released they were. 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?

This was true for only the first generation (Nehalem):

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.

Re: Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

#17

Post by rincebrain »

ddtaylor wrote: post #13

Can we just go back to numbers where higher is always better?

Well, if we have 32 cores at 2 GHz, and 48 cores at 1.5 GHz, from the same chip architecture, which is better?

For some workloads, it's one; for others, it's the other.

A one-dimensional performance axis is hard in practice.

Re: Intel to drop the “I” moniker in upcoming CPU rebrand

#19

Post by opportune »

kibwen wrote: post #4
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

Er… what? As they say in the comments, they’re getting hammered by AMD… so throw away the brand recognition? 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…

I think this is overestimating the amount of "brand recognition" that Intel gets out of the "i". Ordinary consumers don't give a damn about it whatsoever, hell, I guarantee 99% of ordinary people don't even know which manufacturer produced the CPU on any given device that they own. Meanwhile, enthusiasts will roll their eyes and use whatever dumb naming scheme Intel replaces it with. It was terribly convoluted before…

Personally I think the i-N naming convention (and Ryzen naming convention for that matter) may have slightly hurt sales of the higher performance i-3 chips, which could be better than even midrange i- chips for specific or general scenarios.

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.

Post reply on HN