Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel Pour one out for Pentium and another for Celeron. After more than two decades, Intel has scrapped the brands in favor of a new moniker. So what does the x86 giant plan to call its entry-level chips? Intel Processor. And no, that’s not a typo. Capital P. Starting next year, an under-enthused salesperson at your nearest big box …
Do marketing people in tech have any idea how weird they sound when they write or say these things? Can they not sound like an authentic human being?
“Intel is committed to driving innovation to benefit users, and our entry-level processor families have been crucial for raising the PC standard across all price points,” Josh Newman, VP and interim general manager of Mobile Client Platforms at Intel, said in a canned statement.
And my absolute favorite:
“This update streamlines brand offerings across PC segments to enable and enhance Intel customer communication on each product’s value proposition, while simplifying the purchasing experience for customers,” the chipmaker explained.
The word "explained" is doing a lot of work there...
You would think if you wanted to 'streamline' communication of the product's value across the brand you would move the Celeron/Pentium offering to use the Core naming schema, even though they are not the same architecture. Call it 'i1' or something, your average person doesn't give a damn about the architecture inside, they'll now know a i1 is less than an i3 in performance. Even I don't really care about the architecture inside. Does it work? Does it not become a space heater? Can it run the applications I need? Great, I don't care if the electron inside turns right instead of left when it comes out of a gate.
"Simplifying the purchasing experience"
Yeah, sure.
"What processor does this have?"
"An Intel Core i5"
"How about this other one?"
"An Intel Processor"
"Yes, but which one?"
"An Intel Processor processor"
"Huh?!!"
Yep, no scope for any confusion or silliness there. What amazes me is that nobody at Intel put their hand up and called out this stupidity sooner. Honestly, it's one of the dumbest product names I've heard in a long time.
You'd be surprised. One of the webshops here in the NL that sells to mom and pop doesn't even mention the exact model of the processor in the overview , even if you click details twice. It just says i5 or i7, but it might as well be the 2013 model.
Scary future....
For ages they've benefitted by people not making any sort of distinction, and therefore assuming Intel. For instance, since the late '80s, any book or course teaching assembly language never specified the architecture, because OF COURSE it was x86.
An example is that "x64" isn't a real thing - the "x" is supposed to mean it's a placeholder, and there are no 80164 / 80264 / 80364 / 80464, et cetera, processors. But if Microsoft / Intel can make most people who see "64 bit" in relation to a processor assume it's referring to amd64 / x86_64, then that'll make them happy.
Intel knows ARM is a serious, real threat, so if they can co-opt the word "processor", they will. They want people to be confused when they hear "ARM processor".
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You can't trademark a common word. You CAN trademark a common word in specific style/colour/logo design though. On the other hand, successful trademarks can become diluted in common usage, eg Sellotape, Biro, Hoover, Sharpie etc such that they become almost useless in marketing. Intel may have just come up with the shortest ever useful life of a marketing name-brand.
It would be nice for Intel to have produced a few million Intel Processors with Intel Processor processor packaging, lose a court challenge and have to pull-back and destroy or relabel the Processor processors. I guess they could call it the iProcessor and take a chance with a trademark battle with Apple.
There were likely no other software products called "Windows" at the time, so they could trademark it in that context. Apple Computer and Apple Corps could coexist as one was computers and the other was music - although at the time of the resolution, Steve Jobs' company was to keep out of the music sphere.
MS have fallen foul of trademarks themselves - ever wondered why Win 8's Metro UI was renamed Modern UI? Sometimes, the little guy wins (especially when it's European courts, the small guy is a European company and the big guy is a US company already in hot water with European courts).
"MS have fallen foul of trademarks themselves - ever wondered why Win 8's Metro UI was renamed Modern UI? Sometimes, the little guy wins (especially when it's European courts, the small guy is a European company and the big guy is a US company already in hot water with European courts)."
See Also SkyDrive.
There were likely no other software products called "Windows" at the time, [1985]
The X Windowing System (June 1984), commonly known as X-windows, would like a word.
And "windows" was a common name for the multiple programs on a desktop: WIMP, from PARC, 1973...where both Apple and Microsoft got the idea.
You can trademark a word for purposes it wasn't used for before. Windows brand operating system isn't confusing. Windows brand windows would be. Thus, if you want to trademark Processor as the name for your new restaurant, you'll likely be able to do it. Trademarking that for your processor will likely be denied. Snap (the Snapchat people) ran into this a while ago when trying to trademark "Spectacles" for a pair of glasses.
Intel might not even try that, given they're avoiding anything memorable here. They still have a trademark on Intel, so they're probably trying to hide the labels they think users associate with poor performance. Of course, I think if you ask a nontechnical person, they've probably never heard of either existing brand name and couldn't tell you where they are in the product line.
The funny thing about this branding push is that modern Celerons can be pretty good. As long as you don't get a 2016 one by mistake or skimp on the RAM, they're more than capable for many tasks.
The term "window" for a box in a GUI displaying data predates the Windows brand name. For use as a name for an operating system, not so much. Microsoft's use of Windows for the whole system didn't prevent anyone else from saying that they were displaying an application in a window or even that their software was a window manager.
I'm not going to defend them over their trademark battles with other things with "Windows" in the name. How likely those projects were to cause confusion is subjective, and I expect Microsoft, especially 1990s Microsoft, was very lawyer-happy. Using a brand name related to a term is acceptable as long as it's not the term or likely to be confused with that term, and nobody before Microsoft launched Windows would have referred to their GUI operating system as a Windows.
They're trying what Apple did - they called their phone in iPhone, etc. And marketing drones believe whatever Apple do is the best. So a good name for a processor is Processor - marketing drones are already living in Idiocracy and believe everybody else is as dumb as them. Everything need to be simplified - more nuanced thinking should be forbidden. Why sat "better" when you can say "plusgood"?
All of their more recent naming has been very simple like Apple Watch, Apple Silicon, Apple TV+, etc. but that's because they view the 'Apple' brand as being so strong they don't need anything else. If they were naming iPhone today it would undoubtedly be called Apple Phone.
iPad is the last product that got Apple's old 'i' naming scheme they started in the late 90s with iMac. The Apple branding has the virtue of not having to worry about someone else already owning the name 'iX' when you introduce a new product 'X'.
Other than their "Intel Inside" campaign from long ago, Intel has always created brands around their CPUs, first Pentium then Core, along with Xeon on the server side. Unless Intel makes the same change to the rest of their line I have to agree with the article that they are probably doing this because public perception of the Pentium name probably is associated with outdated technology in the minds of consumers over 30, and with low end crap in the minds of the younger ones.
I think Apple started ditching the i prefix when they couldn't call Apple TV "ITV". They'd been buying trademarks from people for a while (even doing that deal with Cisco so they could both use iOS). Admittedly, they didn't bother keeping the iBook brand around earlier than that, so maybe someone figured out that it no longer meant much.
Celeron was originally the branding if you used certain Intel processors AND Intel's wifi chipset.
The idea was that they couldn't demand CPU customers use their expensive wifi chips cos of monopoly laws, but they could stop computer makers from benefiting from the halo of the wonders of the Celeron brand if they didn't pay up
I used to design embedded systems. The Intel rep stopped by our small company and tried to sell us on the advantages of using their processors. So...we tried.
One does not simply...buy...an Intel processor.
Oh, no. One first needs to sign an NDA and be "approved" to purchase their parts. Then, one needs to execute a purchase agreement...and so on. This is about where we went back to buying Motorola/Freescale, ARM and such. Intel, aside from their odd power supply voltage requirements, was just too full of themselves.
I am designing a system with an embedded Intel single board computer, that replaces an external PC, I needed some detailed power consumption specs, so I went to Intel for that. I would need to sign an NDA just to get the specs. We decided just to build the thing and measure the current draw.
They could call them Duck Soup, as even today you tell someone you have an i7, it all sounds great, but when you get into which generation out of the 12 or so, which each have both a generation code name, something like Ivy League, Broadmoor and Skyleak, and then down to their codes - where a 9800 is older than a 7700, and I would not be surprised to find an i6 5318008 floating around in their naming department… so already Intel’s naming is incomprehensible (just like graphics cards…), may as well call them Intel Processor and just give some meaningful name to the range denoting their power.
I would suggest:
- “Cold Treacle” for their low end netbooks,
- “Slow” for the i3,
- “Downhill with a tailwind” for i5,
- “Acceptable” for the i7,
- “Eyewateringly expensive” for the i9.
Add the “Pro” suffix for the Xeon range, and year version them all, so an Intel Processor Cold Treacle 2022 will be slower than the “Eyewateringly Expensive 2022”, but the Slow Pro 2028 may actually be better then the Acceptable 2023.
Clear, simple, to the point.
/rant.
Deliberately incomprehensible
As they haven't been able to keep up with demand for high end parts, they are selling down generation crap with similar names/numbers to confuse buyers and attempt to move the backstock off the shelves. Also helps to disguise the fact that many of the newer parts are both more expensive and worse than their predecessors.
On the upside, AMD has been getting in on the game, and Apple is hardly transparent about the changes to it's M1 and M2 lines over time.
And as honest benchmarks are also unobtainium, we are largely at the mercy of the spec sheet and guesswork, resulting in people overbuilding and over paying for cpu's that sit idling in the low teens for their entire service life.
Perhaps instead of using "Pro" as a suffix, they could use it as a prefix.
Then we'd have "Processor" and "Pro-Processor"; the latter will inevitably be called the "Pro-squared-cessor" or "Pro2-cessor".
Which immediately gives the name for the next iteration, obviously the "Pro3-cessor", " Pro4-cessor" and so on. Or just the pithy "Pro3", " Pro4".
Also useful for commentards, as there are many ways we can turn a "Pro" prefix - for example, when it turns out that the things have a tendency to ping out of the socket they can be called the "Prolapsed-cessor".
They might be better off reducing the range of products. Most of of them are not especially special, just a little different. Maybe follow the fast food industry and have three CPUs, Medium (or Regular), Large and Extra Large. No Small, that won't sell according to Marketing). And when the cooling system fails, you can have fries with it too.
"They might be better off reducing the range of products. Most of of them are not especially special, just a little different."
True...but Intel and their hardware manufacturing partners want products at different price points and using the same motherboard design.
This way they can offer a $499 laptop with a slower CPU and for just another $50/$100/$200 you can get the same hardware but using slightly faster CPUs. This then allows these brands to offer a range of products at different price points to suit people with different budgets.
And limiting the range of processors has another impact: I've helped a few friends when their 3-4 year old laptops started going slowly (usually due to dust/detritus buildup inside the fan assemblies). It's a simple task (usually) to take the laptop shell apart, clean out the fans and then I've bought some faster clocked CPUs (from the same range) off "laptop breakers/recycling" firms for just a few $$ that fit the existing CPU socket and they give a nice boost for no real extra cost while also renewing the silicon paste to keep it ticking over. So, that market would vanish with fewer CPUs in each range !
"laptops...faster clocked CPUs...that fit the existing CPU socket"
Not something I see very often on the many business grade laptops I see everyday. In many cases, the base RAM is onboard too with a single SODIMM socket for expansion. Consumer grade often won't even have any socketed RAM, never mind a socketed CPU. At best, it'll be a socketed NVMe SSD, about the only upgradeable item in the system nowadays. Making things slimmer and lighter (and cheaper to make) has driven this. Leading to many more models on offer at many price points because you can no longe buy a cheap model and later upgrade it. So yet more landfill.
Sort of. Parts binning based on speed has always been a thing, i.e. "this chip won't work at 2.4GHz but is fine at 2.2. Whooa! This one goes all the way to 2.8!” It's getting slightly less of a thing now because speed limits are as much thermal as fundamental. Still multicore opened up another avenue - one core on this quad core doesn't work. Disable it and another one; flog it as a dual core.
Maybe Intel call follow USB's lead, and confuse up their naming even more.
The Intel Core i9 can become Intel Processor Gen 13.2 ludicrous speed 2x2. Then the i7 would be Intel Processor Gen 13.2 ludicrous speed. The i5 -- Intel Processor Gen 13.2 super speed 2. The i3 -- Intel Processor Gen 13.2 super speed. Pentium -- Intel Processor Gen 13.2. And lastly, Celeron -- Intel Processor Gen 13.1.
They already have a ridiculously overblown product line with too many options, as does AMD. Why does there ever need to be more than, say, 5 CPU models on the market, for any given generation?
But at least AMD has cool names like Ryzen and Threadripper. Intel is rubbish at naming: I mean "Core" is bad enough, for a thing that contains, erm, cores - in varying numbers. So now there will be a "Processor", with cores, but not Core cores. But the Cores with all their cores are also processors, funnily enough. Honestly, do people get paid for this stuff?
"Why does there ever need to be more than, say, 5 CPU models on the market, for any given generation?"
Well, there are at least that number of levels for power usage (very thin laptops 7-15 W, normal laptops 15-30 W, high-end laptops or compact desktops usually around 45 W, mid-range desktop parts often around 65 W, and workstations or gaming machines above 90 W). That's if I simplify quite a bit, because there's a lot of different levels in that "above 90" category, 15 and 28 produce very different laptop performance setups, and so on throughout the ranges. Having five units altogether would mean exactly one for each level. You want the AMD laptop processor, 6th gen? I hope you like it.
Even if we expand it to five per category, which is closer to what we actually have today, it's cost versus performance. If I'm going to buy a laptop for an office user, I don't want to give them a processor that'll produce awesome performance on complex games; in order to get that performance, it will cost double what the needed part costs and it will run down the battery faster unless they've markedly improved the firmware that scales down when the machine is idle. The packages we buy aren't even just a CPU. For example, you can have AMD processors with integrated graphics or without them. If you have GPU-intensive tasks so will be supplying a discrete graphics unit, skipping the lower-power included ones can allow you to get a cheaper or faster CPU-only device.
Comparison shopping between tons of models can be annoying, but there are benefits from not having to buy the top of the line because they didn't bother making anything else.
Intel will no longer treat their cheapskate Celeron buyers as Second Class Citizens to be mocked in the Intel Board Room as ... C-Section Losers. Those days are over. A Celeron buyer should not feel the heavy Jackboot of Discrimination on them. Mocked ruthlessly as they have been in the past by the 13-year-old gamer snit next door! "I didn't know you could pause Grand Theft Auto like that..."
And Intel should not feed the superiority complex of those who invested in PENTIUM as a status symbol. "Oh let me go get my Pentium laptop, I left it inside my Tesla."
From now on the processors will look the same, have the same number of pins. This specification information will be more highly secured than adoption papers. Variations in processor economic status will no longer be tolerated at Intel. That is undeniably a step forward...
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Intel
(KISS, an acronym for keep it simple stupid)
I'm surprised that no processor manufacturer has never just added +1 to their processor name every time they release a new chip.
So an Intel 1 would have less performance than a Intel 10, but an Intel 11 may have less performance than the more expensive Intel 9. But you can be reasonably sure that an Intel 100 would leave an Intel 10 behind in a cloud of dust.
A bit like you knew that an
That a 80386 was going to be faster than a 80286.
(80386 initially had similar performance per MHz as a 80286, but after a few iterations 386 chips out performed all 286 chips, because of a higher clock rate. This is not unexpected since both chips were manufactured using a 1.5 µm process. Some common instructions on the 286 were actually faster than the initial 386 chips if the clock rate was the same. Again not unexpected because one had a 16 bit data width and an 24-bit address width, while the other had a 32 bit data width and an 32-bit address width - resolved once they added the option of 16 to 64 KiB of external cache to the 386 and eventually changed that to 8 to 16KiB of internal cache).
And that a 80486 was going to be faster than a 80386.
And that a pentium(586) was going to be faster than a 80486, unless it involved serious maths.
The marketing weenies were active back then as well, not so simple. In the era of the 386 and 486 you had either a DX or SX variation which meant different things depending on the generation 386 or 486. Prior to that iAPX was prefixed to the 8088, 8086 and others including the 80186, 80286, and the 80386.There were other suffixes as well which while looking the same meant different things depending on the main part number.
I think the only reason this was confusion not as prevalent then was because marketing was just getting started on selling their importance to the corporation and subsequent control.
You can’t trademark a number, hence Cyrix, AMD and others selling 486 branded products.
Pentium was a way of trying to say 586 though following that naming convention we’ve had P2, PIII, P4, and 13 generations of i3/5/7. So we should be on the 2186 by now. (More if you count versions within p2/3/4).
Today, Pentium and Celeron are names synonymous with “shit laptop”, using the off cuts of die production from better cpus. Associating the name “Intel Processor” to “Shit laptop” does not sound like a smart move, because shit sticks.
I happen to have had a couple of work mandated high end Intel core offerings of late, and they all have a habit of roasting themselves to death. Exterior of the case routinely at 50+C. Not helped by overly invasive work spyware that runs all the time so it overmatches the heat sinks ability to deal with the continuous load.
I was working at a Road Break Down Organisation which shall remain anonymous ...bit like Alcoholics Anonymous.
CIO wanted to standardise on the new PCs and send out a round robin email to the Board of Directors.
Unfortunately he chose "automatically accept alternatives" on the spell checker so the email requested funds for the organisation to standardise on P*n*s computers with benefits including "a 20,000 hours uptime between failure".
Celeron? Pentium? I knew there was some overlap where they still sold Celerons along with Core chips... but I thought they had stopped doing that years ago, that the low-end model was a Core i3. *shrug*. Oh well, whatever. I end up looking at actual specs for CPUs anyway rather than some marketing name, given how fast the performance of each generation of chip increases (i.e. an i3 now having similar performance to an i5 from a few years back and an i7 from a few years before that.)
If i even asked my family or none techy friends what name the CPU is inside their PC they would not know or even care. Intel have for years been trying to make themselves into a household name my slapping Intel inside stickers on PCs, having a catchy jingle and giving their chips names. But barely anyone outside enthusiasts give a toss about this sort of thing. I mean its just as important to have a decide SSD and RAM, but i don't see stickers for Hynix RAM or Samsung SSD inside on PCs. So why do we care when it comes to having a CPU from AMD or Intel?
No doubt before you know it will go from being just Intel Processor to having a Gen 2, Pro, Silver or Gold versions with whatever model number tacked on to differentiate the number of cores, cache etc so will be just as confusing as it is now.
Brands created in a vacuum once again. VPs pay more attention to their stock options than what their REAL customers think... and no, the overpaid marketing agency that did the alleged "customer research" doesn't count. The failing triangle of leaders, employees, and customers continues... :(
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I hate Intel naming convention, when their projects already have pretty catchy marketable names!
Examples:
Alder Lake processor, instead of Intel i7 11th gen 856645612344445.
I had a Northwood, er, Pentium 4 3,2GHz.
Look at the others: Prescott. Cedar Mill, all good names. Just slap the name, and the clock in front if necessary.
(Microsoft is not clear either: Scorpio console, instead of PSBOX 5 series X)
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