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

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

#41

Post by p1necone »

klodolph wrote: post #32
MBCook wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with Nvidia is that I blinked and the numbers wrapped around, so a GeForce RTX 4070 is really new, but a GeForce FX 5200 is really old.

Same! I still remember the 8800gtx being "current" high end and the 2XX cards being the recently announced space-age new ones.

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.

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

#42

Post by modeless »

MBCook wrote: post #15
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…

If you think Nvidia's product naming makes any kind of sense, try a few rounds of my GPU quiz: https://james.darpinian.com/gpu-quiz.html

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

#43

Post by Infernal »

MBCook wrote: post #15
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…

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.

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

#44

Post by mhh__ »

modeless wrote: post #42
MBCook wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you think Nvidia's product naming makes any kind of sense, try a few rounds of my GPU quiz: https://james.darpinian.com/gpu-quiz.html

I did it for 12 questions or so and didn't get any wrong.

The naming schemes are completely, completely, retarded but they also aren't that hard to guess

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

#45

Post by opportune »

jzb wrote: post #7

“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.” Who’s the “average” consumer here? I’m skeptical that the majority of PC buyers have internalized the “i” branding. Gamers, sure. But average consumers? I’ve talked a number of less computer savvy friends and family through computer purchases and there was a…

With the i branding, a desktop vendor could sell an “i9” using a less performant, old i9 chip that could perform much worse than a new i5. Conversely some i3 chips are rather good but at a glance a consumer will think they are too low-end. This is bad for Intel, a consumer may buy an i9 machine and think “wow, this is terrible for a highend chip, Intel really sucks” because it was a bad i9 or prefer a worse-suited i5 over an i3 due to assuming 5>3.

I’d prefer a more literate convention I described in other comments, but the new convention may at least prevent reductively bucketing skus. The old buckets were just descriptive enough to suggest a quality and performance hierarchy, but dangerously so, because even a 3 could be better than a 9 in some cases.

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

#46

Post by opportune »

ddtaylor wrote: post #13

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

You can’t preserve ordering mapping permutations of a high-dimensional space (specs: clock rate, power, cores, cache, pipelining/vectorization, etc) with another high dimensional space (benchmarks, workloads, and scenarios) to a single number. It’s possible even for a chip with superior numerical specs across the board from another chip to perform worse due to lack of support for specialized instructions or differences in thermals.

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

#47

Post by atmavatar »

rincebrain wrote: post #17
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.

For some reason, that comparison reminds me of:

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"

-Seymour Cray

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

#48

Post by userbinator »

Infernal wrote: post #43
MBCook wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

In other words, "middle endianness".

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

#49

Post by Dylan16807 »

wmf wrote: post #35
rdtsc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are just so many people who say they have an “i5” or “i7” without knowing what generation it is from. 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 suffi…

BMW is also still selling the 5 series.

Cars don't double in performance over the course of five years.

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

#50

Post by Dylan16807 »

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?

Huh? From the very start through gen 7 the tiers were 2 cores with hyperthreading, 4 without, 4 with. And sometimes more at the very top, in different forms.

The first two generations of core processors had a different pattern, but those were "core [2] solo/duo/quad", they had no i and no tier numbers.

(And before that was pentium 4/D.)

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