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

101–110 of 142 posts

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

#101

Post by Macha »

MBCook wrote: post #23
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…

While somewhat ridiculous, I kind of feel like they might’ve been better off if they were currently selling the Pentium 17. Anyone can look at 17 and compare it to the number on their older computer (say Pentium 14) and know it’s better. Apple is doing this right so far with the M chips, but they’re about to be on #3. We’ll see how long they stick with it. They have so far in phones.

The thing is that these companies have so many SKUs because they're trying to address so many market segments and so newer is not always automatically better. Then technology (and competition) advances at an uneven pace so you end up with some generations (2 -> 3, 6 -> 7, 10 -> 11) where the generational difference is "who cares", and some generations (9 -> 10, 11 -> 12) where basically the entire old generation is obsolete.

Apple is tackling an easier problem since they're focusing on subdivisions of the high margin premium consumer segment. But there's a world of difference between the €1400 base model m1 macbook air and the €550 windows machines the standard consumer here buys. A lot of Apple's target market looks at the €1400 MBA doing quite well against comparably priced windows machines (well as long as you aren't gaming, running legacy business applications, or actually in need of more than 8gb of RAM), and sees the €950 price difference to what people actually buy as irrelevant, but for e.g. my parents that pays for their next laptop in a decade too.

Once you're into that price sensitive market, you end up needing from a business imperative that smattering of SKUs, since the person selling a €600 laptop wants something they can point to as better than the €550 laptop and at that market, people are not buying €50 for lighter or more aesthetically appealing laptops. Then a sort of mirror happens at the high end since it's users buying CPUs directly and therefore more informed so it's not as easy to just make some tiers and extract maximum consumer surplus for the higher tiers.

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

#104

Post by ethbr0 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #50
ethbr0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

So we're talking about Nehalem and Westmere as the first two i* releases.

Nehalem desktop had: Celeron P1053 (1 core HT), i5 750/760 (4 core no HT), i7 860-960 (4 core HT)

Westmere desktop had: Pentium/Celeron G59XX/G1101 (2 core no HT), i3 530-560 (2 core HT), i5 650-680 (2 core HT), i7 970-980 (6 core HT)

Links in sibling post above.

So really... the HT / no HT really only lasted one release (Nehalem), and that didn't even have an i3.

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

#105

Post by gxt »

p1necone wrote: post #36
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…

You've touched on the main problem (imo) that seems to happen with large hardware companies adopting consistent naming for performance segments in your comment. Once you've got a sane naming scheme and you've used it for a few generations the incentive to use it to mislead consumers is very high. Why sell this generations X070 equivalent as an x070 when you can call it an x080 instead and know that a very large chunk…

Let's just adopt an open-sourced hardware naming scheme then.

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

#106

Post by Macha »

void-pointer wrote: post #90

Apple understood this from the word go and I don’t understand why everyone else is struggling so much: M 1 Pro ^ ^ ^ Form Gen Intra-gen Factor Differentiator Admittedly, the Pro/Max/Ultra names are arbitrary, but it’s still easier to pronounce and understand than “Intel Core i9-10900K”

    i5       10     700k
     ^       ^      ^
    Bracket  Gen    In gen differentiator

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

#107

Post by bfrog »

No one really does a nice job of this, once the marketing department gets hold its all "super/ultra/maximum/titanium/silver/gold/plantinum/diamond" etc

These words have lost all meaning. No its not just Intel, its literally every single consumer cpu and gpu maker.

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

#108

Post by izoow »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #21
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…

> “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.” I feel like you're either in one of two groups: 1. a PC "nerd" (kind of deragotory) who is obsessed with specs all the way down to things like L2 cache size, etc. 2. somebody who has 0 clue what any computer/laptop specification means whatsoever

There’s also the “average PC gamer” that has some clue about computer parts, but wouldn’t be able to tell you what something like L2 cache is. I’d say that’s quite a large part of the consumer base as well.

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

#110

Post by abudabi123 »

bfrog wrote: post #107

No one really does a nice job of this, once the marketing department gets hold its all "super/ultra/maximum/titanium/silver/gold/plantinum/diamond" etc These words have lost all meaning. No its not just Intel, its literally every single consumer cpu and gpu maker.

Associate each product with three names targeting the market segment that is classy:tea, classless:water, crass:fizzypop-zerosugar. The regulator should assign a grid coordinate for the product to locate its absolute/relative performance. ARM seems to have a meaningful naming scheme a:application, r:i-forget, m:mobile.
Post reply on HN