Recent example is Intel dropping the i from their CPU branding. What was an Intel Core i7 is now an “Intel Core Ultra 7”. This is a bizarre choice. The i3, i5, and i7 branding is very much a household name, and they’re just throwing that away.
Infinitely worse, they’ve also thrown out their low end Pentium and Celeron CPU branding. Now they’re simply calling them all a generic “Intel Processor”. What the actual fuck? People avoid Pentiums and Celerons because they’re widely regarded the absolute bottom of the silicon barrel. Now instead of “don’t get a Celeron, it’s practically e-waste” it’s going to be “don’t get an INTEL PROCESSOR, it’s practically e-waste”. Holy shit.
A bunch of rich fucking failchildren got paid the big bucks for these ideas meanwhile I’m making min wage working infinitely harder while actually producing a non-negative surplus value for my employer to steal.
Being confusing is the point. Because, you see, an Intel Core i7 isn’t just an Intel Core Ultra 7, it’s an Intel Core Ultra 7 and also an Intel Core 7. And is the Core Ultra 5 better than a Core 7? Who knows, maybe, maybe not.
Also notice that a Core Ultra 7 processor 155H has four more cores and twice the cache of a Core Ultra 7 processor 155U. And how many of those cores are P-cores, how many of them are E-cores? Who knows! And then a Core 7 processor 150U has two fewer cores than the Core Ultra 7 processor 155U, and the same cache, but a much faster max clock than any of the Core Ultra models.
Intel actively does not want anyone to understand these model names.
It’s so OEMs can put an Intel Ultra badge on their laptops instead of i3 or i5. Especially since AMD is kinda dominating that market right now.
And Apple switched to Silicon so that massive customer is gone
You’d think this kind of infantilizing of the customer would drive people to hate these companies and grow wary of marketing in general.
Don’t patronize me when I’m buying a cheap machine. I know it’s cheap, and would rather figure that out via Silver/Gold/Platinum or Tier 1/2/3 or whatever than this nonsense.
Yeah but it’s deliberately deceptive. I would expect, for example, a Core 7 150U to outperform a Core Ultra 7 155U in most tasks because it trades away the two weakest cores and the useless NPU for an extra 600MHz boost on the cores that actually matter but you really have to dig into spec sheets to figure those details out
Understanding the names and numbers and what they mean with respect to PC processors and graphics cards is the kind of knowledge that drives you mad like a Lovecraft character. The only sensible way to buy a computer chip is to compare the ones in your budget range directly against each other using benchmark data from third party testers.
The simplest way I describe it is
Generation X (this is a name or a number)
Low budget, Medium budget, High budget. (a second name, or a second number)
4060 - 4000 series (generation) (60 = low budget/70 = medium/80 = high)
This holds true for most generations of tech hardware products regardless of whether they use names, numbers or a combination of the two.
Yeah the numbers in desktop CPU and GPU names are usually pretty straight forward. I think it’s the suffixes after the numbers that tend to trip people up, the new RTX 4070 “Ti Super” takes the cake there.
On the other hand, it’s usually mobile chips where the naming get ridiculous.
Nvidia was good about it for the most part until around RTX got started, at that point they dropped the m suffix from their laptop GPUs. This misleads a ton of people into thinking they are actually similar to the desktop parts in performance. For example, the desktop RTX 4070 has 12GB of VRAM and has comparable gaming performance to a 3090. Meanwhile the laptop RTX 4070 has 8GB of VRAM and performs between a desktop 3060 and 3060 Ti. It’s very scummy the two chips share the exact same name.
AMD does this thing where the third digit in their laptop CPUs denotes architecture instead of relative performance, misleading people into thinking the first number indicating generation also indicates architecture. The 7420U and the 7640U are in the same generation despite the former being all the way back on Zen 2 and the latter on the latest Zen 4.
And I have no idea what the fuck Intel was doing with their mobile chips even before the meteor lake rebranding. My laptop contains an 11th gen i7-1165G7, it’s built on Intel’s 10nm node. Its 10th gen predecessor, the i7-1065G7, was also on 10nm. Here they decided to use the suffixes G1, G4, and G7 to indicate iGPU performance tiers. Before those two CPUs, the equivalent product segment used the more traditional format, an example being the i7-8650U where the U denotes low power. But at the same time there existed the i7-10610U. It’s in the same generation as the i7-1065G7, but built on the older 14nm node. Something about that name is apparently supposed to denote the process node but I have no idea what it is.
After just two generations, Intel decided to drop the iGPU suffixes. The i7-1165G7’s successor was just the i7-1265U. For impossible to comprehend reasons, they didn’t return the fifth digit that the G7 suffix originally pushed off. Then the 12th and 13th gen mobile chips end up easily mistaken for first gen chips because their model numbers start with a 1 without any context for whether the second number is also part of the generation number.
the real marketing is the marketing they do to their bosses or clients, not to the consumers
remember back in 2010 whatever when that graphic designer convinced pepsi execs to pay them $15 whatever million to redo the pepsi logo and they just made it all wavey, sold a BS sale pitch about it’s like the globe now, and ended up writing a blog post laughing their asses off at it? you love to see it.
Here’s an old post with a link to the design doc
Most of the executives and internal marketers knew it was absolute horseshit, they just knew that if the brand change lost 2% sales instead of gained 2% sales, they would face worse personal consequences if they spent 20k on the rebrand than if they spent 15 million on the rebrand.
Because capitalism is the most efficient system
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It’s a jobs program for fail children with comms degrees
You aren’t paid for your skills, you are paid for your unflinching resolve in manipulating people psychologically to extract money from them.
