Final month we heard that Intel was planning on shaking up the branding for its long-running sequence of Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 CPUs. Not an enormous shake-up — in actual fact about as innocuous as issues could be, merely dropping a single letter from each. Right this moment it’s official: Beginning with Meteor Lake releases later this yr, Intel processors can be named both Core 3, 5, 7, 9, (observe the shortage of the “i”) or Core Extremely variants thereof.
That’s in response to a sprawling press launch from Intel itself, which additionally notes that some sub-brand labels like Intel Evo Version laptops and vPro Enterprise and vPro Necessities units will retain their present labels. Why change issues up now, after greater than 15 years of the Core iNumber setup? Apart from basic rules like “a change is as good as a rest,” Intel appears to assume that the brand new AI craze is sufficient to deserve the excellence.
Intel
“Meteor Lake…will be the first client processor manufactured on the new Intel 4 process node. It’s the first client chiplet design enabled by Foveros advanced 3D packaging technology, and it will deliver improved power efficiency and graphics performance. It’s also the first Intel client processor to feature a dedicated AI engine: Intel AI Boost,” says the press launch.
The brand new chips may even get a barely up to date visible identification, with some gradient dots added to Intel’s typical blue colour scheme. “Ultra” chips, one of the best and strongest of their generations, will present that label off entrance and heart backside and barely to the left. Intel can be dropping “generational branding,” labels like “13th-generation Core i5.” However you may guess that tech press (like PCWorld) and basic nerds (additionally like PCWorld) will most likely keep on with that moniker, if just for a straightforward method to differentiate newer designs from older ones.
