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.
ive always found the Core branding a little baffling, why is it 14th Gen Core i7? Anyway this new branding doesn’t seem much better. They should just give them yearly updates and have a few different letters to represent the different lines like phone makers do. Or do what NVIDIA does and just use progressively bigger numbers.
The “14th generation” is arguably the most useful part of the name, since it usually defines other expectations-- the core types and counts.
They use progressively larger numbers too, but also a bunch of letters to hint on features enabled. A 2500K used to be a 2500 that allowed overclocking, but I’m not sure what a 14900OMGWTFBBQ does.
It’s a jobs program for fail children with comms degrees
I find that the marketing teams inside tech companies have a way of becoming career whirlpools that lock in some people and fling others out. The ones that get flung out are the ones that make waves (I apologize for this strained analogy).
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
If I had to guess, they are renaming it to differentiate themselves from Apple, and probably some focus group told them that products with the letter “i” at the beginning sounds dated the way using “extreme” in a product name sounds very 90s.
Normally, I would guess that it’s some new CEO looking to “make their mark” but the Intel CEO oversaw the development and launch of the Core chips while he was CTO.
