Essential Linkage: Intel pulls an NVIDIA-esque move and mixes up names.
Renaming components in the tech industry is a pretty common practice, most commonly seen with graphics cards that are a simple core clock or memory bus change, but sometimes there's almost no difference - which leads to the kind of trouble that NVIDIA got themselves into.
What's most surprising however is that not only do the graphics card manufacturers change names but now Intel has followed suit, completely rearranging their nomenclature for reasons that are unclear.
The naming seems perfectly functional to us; with a Core 2 Duo having two cores and a Quad having four it's really not rocket surgery for the average consumer to figure out exactly what they're buying.
One of Intel's staff posted up an explanation of their confounding move on the Intel blog:
"Secondly, we are focusing our strategy around a primary 'hero' client brand which is Intel® CoreTM. Today the Intel Core brand has a mind boggling array of derivatives (such as CoreTM2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, etc). Over time those will go away and in its place will be a simplified family of Core processors spanning multiple levels: Intel® CoreTM i3 processor, Intel® CoreTM i5 processor, and Intel® CoreTM i7 processors."
It seems that as a part of their latest Ad campaign - Sponsors of Tomorrow - they've decided to ensure that the people of tomorrow have much less capability to recognise just what processor they're buying.
The Core 2 series looks to be renamed the Core i3, leaving the midrange Core i5 processors as LGA1156-based Nehalem chips and the higher end Core i7 processors as LGA1366-based Nehalem chips.
The move is reminiscent of NVIDIA's renaming of the 8800GTS to the 9800GTX, then the GTS250 - seemingly a random change that didn't benefit anyone at all and simply confused consumers who no longer had any idea what to expect from the cards performance-wise.
Even stranger than their renaming of the Core 2 is that they're hanging on to the Celeron and Pentium branding of the lower-end chips, adding a further layer of wtf to the cake of confusion:
We will still have Celeron for entry-level computing at affordable price points, Pentium for basic computing, and of course the Intel® AtomTM processor for all these new devices ranging from netbooks to smartphones.
It's a terrible move in our eyes, something that was thought of in a marketing meeting somewhere deep within the bowels of the company that must have seemed a great idea at the time - practically it seems less than useful.
Post below if your thoughts on renaming processors echo ours, or if you think this move is a good one.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009