7 ms·
I will never understand why Intel stuck with the i3, i5, i7, and later i9 branding across so many generations. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard peo
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I will never understand why Intel stuck with the i3, i5, i7, and later i9 branding across so many generations.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people wonder why their 10-year old computer is slow. “But I have an i7”
- lostgame 5y agoThank you for saying this. Honestly - it's not even the i3, i5, i7, i9 thing. It's the fact that two i5s, etc; can be ludicrously different in terms of performance from one another because of the sub-generations within the named generations. Yes - it's ridiculous that I could buy an i7 ten years ago, buy an i7 today, and yet - of course - they are absolutely nothing close to each other in terms of performance. IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)
- caspper69 5y agoTo play devil’s advocate, I can buy a Corvette today that is nothing like the one from ten years ago too. In fact, lots of things are like this.
- Dylan16807 5y agoHow much does the top speed differ?
- ubercore 5y agoMore important than top speed, 0-60 went from 4.2 to 2.9 seconds in that time. So the analogy stands
- neogodless 5y agohttps://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2011/Jun/0609_corvette.html https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content... About 10 years ago. 7:19.63 (ZR1 / i9) https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-sets-strong-nurburgring-lap-time/ https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-s... About a year ago 7:29.90 (base model / i3) Better measure than top speed anyway
- Invictus0 5y agoCorvettes like all cars are identified by their model year. Hence there is no confusion that a 2021 Corvette is "better" than a 2011 Corvette.
- dylan604 5y agoAre the '21 models better than an '11? I don't think anyone would say they'd rather have a '21 than a '69.
- jmchuster 5y agoI do love collecting my old classics, but every time I'm the one driving my wife's Civic, I think, huh, everything about modern cars is better in every single way.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoIncluding pervasive tracking of driving habits and who you associate with, sold to the highest bidder. :-(
- geofft 5y agoIn terms of speed, definitely - the '69 Corvette's zero-to-60 mph time was about 7 seconds, the '11 Corvette took about 4 seconds, and the '21 Corvette takes under three seconds. Sustained performance, maximum speed, etc. has also improved.
- fastball 5y agoThey would if they were looking for top speed.
- neogodless 5y agoDepends on if I have a garage and a team to keep it running good, if I'm taking it for a nice drive or just showing it off in a museum.... The long, swooping '69 is iconic, but there are lots of things to prefer about a modern model.
- NoSorryCannot 5y agoAlmost everyone knows that the model year is part of the, idk, "minimal tuple" for identifying vehicles, though, and you can count on it always appearing in e.g. advertisements. In CPU land, the architecture codename or process node might be part of such a "minimal tuple" but these are frequently omitted by OEMs and retailers in their advertising materials.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThe point is that people think the numeral in the brand is something like a version number in which larger numerals are better. I.e., an i7 is always better than an i5 when in fact a new i5 might exceed the performance of a dated i7 for some particular metric.
- Macha 5y agoOr frankly one new i5 might be powerful than a new i7 if one's a desktop or H series and the other is a Gx or U series.
- throw-away_42 5y ago2009 C6 Corvette ZR1: 0-60 in 3.3 seconds 2019 C7 Corvette ZR1: 0-60 in 3.2 seconds
- bluedino 5y agoI have always hated 0-60 because it depends greatly on transmission shift points, driver ability, rear end ratio, and most of all traction, which OEM street tires have little of. Let’s go to a full quarter mile, which show a bigger difference, but again not a huge one. 2009: 11.2 seconds/130.5 mph 2019: 10.6-seconds/134 mph This would be a better comparison of Ford Mustang GT’s of the same year. Massive improvement.
- echlebek 5y agoIt's a crappy metric. What about: Time to stop from 60 mph? Effective turning radius at 60 mph? Interior noise in decibels at 60 mph? Maximum shock absorption at 60 mph?
- fomine3 5y agoThis is valid since Intel's naming scheme is influenced by BMW.
- simondotau 5y agoI can't wait for Intel to release an i7 variant as the i8 Gran Coupé.
- the_arun 5y agoInstead they could have just called them i2017, i2018... going with year of manufacturing. That way it is useful to make some sense out of performance with an understanding iN is always better than i(N-1)
- Dylan16807 5y agoThat gives you the opposite problem, where someone gets a brand new dual core and is confused by it being slower.
- londons_explore 5y agoBest is to give them a number that approximately maps to performance. The "pro" version might be an i8, while the budget version is i3. In a few years time, the pro version will be up to i12 while the budget version is now i8. You have model numbers for when someone needs to look up some super specific detail.
- lostgame 5y agoRight. The issue I have with this is that we have i7 models that are from 5 and 10 years ago with vastly different performance due to their generation. If it was more iterative it would make more sense.
- vetinari 5y agoYear of manufacturing says nothing; you can have two different gens manufactured in the same year, one for lower price tier and the other for the higher one. Just like Apple still produces older iPhones, same thing. Instead, you have designations like "Intel Core i7 8565U Whiskey Lake" or "Intel Core i7 10510U Comet Lake". The first one is 8th generation (=8xxx), the second one is 10th generation (10xxx, but the 14nm one, not the 10nm "Ice Lake"), and most OEMs do put these into their marketing materials and they are on their respective web shops (these two specifically were copied from two different Thinkpads X1 Carbon models).
- cowmoo728 5y agoThen there's the Acer way of naming products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" so that each one is unique. I like Intel's clearly defined 9 > 7 > 5 > 3. However, I do wish that Intel made the model generation part of their marketing material so that retailers and OEMs would be forced to include that information in their product marketing too. Intel i7.2019, for example.
- rualca 5y ago> Then there's the Acer way of naming products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" This take is deceitful. Acer typically uses a very simple scheme to define their products, which goes something like "Acer <product line> <model>". The scheme "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" is more a kin to a product ID, which goes way beyond make and model and specifies exactly which hardware combination is shipped in a particular product. Complaining that Acer names its products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" makes as much sense as complaining that Apple names its laptops like MVFM2xx/A, which Apple uses for the same effect.
- fomine3 5y agoThe model number is placed on the beginning of the title. Or you argue that we should call it as """ 37.5” UltraWide QHD (3840 x 1600) AMD FreeSync Monitor (USB 3.1 Type-C Port, Display Port, HDMI Port) """ ? https://www.amazon.com/Acer-XR382CQK-bmijqphuzx-UltraWide-FreeSync/dp/B01N6S1P2D https://www.amazon.com/Acer-XR382CQK-bmijqphuzx-UltraWide-Fr...
- sgerenser 5y agoWTF, XR382CQK bmijqphuzx is really the model of an Acer monitor?
- bigcheesegs 5y agoThis is not at all how monitor marketing works. Every company gives them insane nonsense names. There is no other identifier. for XR382CQK bmijqphuzx there is no product line or model other than "monitor". That's all you get.
- techrat 5y ago> IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.) Current Pentium and Celeron chips can either be mobile variants of the Core line or... Atoms. I have a Celeron N4100 in my cheap netbook. It's listed as "Gemini Lake" in Intel ARK, which is a rebranding of its original lineage... Goldmont. (Goldmont Plus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microprocessors#Goldmont_Plus_based_Celerons_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_micropro... If you were to look at other Gemini Lake cores... You'll see that "Pentium Silver" also falls into that group. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codename/83915/products-formerly-gemini-lake.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam... TLDR: Intel has made it nearly impossible for anyone to know if they're getting Core based or Atom based mobile chips unless significant research is done beforehand. This is not to say avoid Atoms at all costs. The N4100 I have is reasonably on par with the Core 2 Q6600 quad, which was quite the beast of a chip back in its day. The current Atoms are nothing like the in-order-execution only monstrosities they originally launched as... but I still find Intel's branding a bit more than confusing. If incredibly deceitful.
- bluejekyll 5y agoExcept this is an article about the Apple MacBook Pro 16" which came out aprox. 1 year ago (edit, 1 and a half years ago).
- tambourine_man 5y agoTo be fair, it's probably not the CPU that's making their computer feel slow. Most likely, the lack of SSD and small amount of RAM.
- gambiting 5y agoNo joke. I still daily use a 2008 MacBook Pro(with a Core2Duo CPU), with an SSD and 8GB of ram and that machine is perfectly fine for what I need it for - browsing the web, replying to emails, listening to Spotify, watching YouTube/Netlix. And people have bought a 2019 iMac with a normal 1TB 5400rpm HDD(!!!!!) And complain that it's slow. Yeah, of course it is, but it has nothing to do with the CPU in there.
- tambourine_man 5y agoYeap. It helps that Intel has missed the ball in the last 5 years or so. And tech savvy users are used to watching CPU/RAM usage, which helps a lot too. My wife had a “my computer is slow” issue the other day. Fans blowing like crazy, extremely hot, battery draining fast. Turns out, lsof was stuck on some corrupt preferences file. Killed the process and file and all was fine. Regular people lack the tools to diagnose the problem and just deal with it, restart or buy a new one. We really should make diagnosing easier.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoReplace Geek Squad with a very small (AI/ML) script. No, seriously. Once the root cause is found, humanize the description of the problem and ask the user what they want to do about it.
- eli 5y agoHave you seen the software the Apple Genius Bar uses to troubleshoot problems? It’s all scripted out with lots of automation.
- 5y ago
- failwhaleshark 5y agoBut it's a 9.21 Jigawatt, 11 GHz, i21 processor!? And it's cycle- and power-efficiency figures are? Only the frequency wars ended, the marketing and features wars continue the prohibition on computer architecture enlightenment unabated.
- MikusR 5y agoExactly. They should have named them Air, Pro and iMac. That way you clearly can see which is fastest and which year they came out.
- jvreeland 5y agoIt seem pretty common for people who own Apple products to say "2013 macbook air" and that is easy to find on the device or in the software. Apple makes it pretty clear newer is better. Intel has a bunch of lakes and numbers and an easier way to tell would be nice all around. Though Apple has less skus to differentiate making it much easier for them.
- MikusR 5y agoIt's pretty common for people who own Intel cpus to say 5th gen or 9th gen or to easily find on the device or in the software the name of cpu like i5-4670k or i9-9900K
- WantonQuantum 5y agoI think GP is talking about a branding problem though. Non tech savvy people may not realise that the i7 in that new computer at the store is different from the i7 written on the front of their PC. For years CPUs had numbers that went up: 286, 386, 486, Pentium. After that, it was Mhz and Ghz that people used to rate a CPU. But none of those things are as relevant as they used to be. So what number goes up? i3, i5, i7, i9. That's what Intel is telling us. That's the number they want us to see.
- ultimoo 5y agoEven on Mac OS, when you go to "About This Mac" -> "System Report", you only see the iBranding and not the generation (I see "6-Core Intel Core i7" on mine for example).
- katbyte 5y agofrom about this mac: > MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) > Processor 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 prettly clear there
- viraptor 5y agoI've seen the generation mentioned first in almost all places. For example https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops/xps-15-laptop/spd/xps-15-7590-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops/xps-15-laptop/spd/xp... lists "9th generation Intel core i5". How come people pay attention to the other number more?
- alpaca128 5y agoThey pay more attention to the other number because that's how the English language works. "9th generation" is a descriptive prefix to the actual CPU model name. I don't get why not a single brand other than Apple gets product names remotely right. Every time a relative asks me for a laptop recommendation and shows me a list of models I have absolutely no clue what to tell them. All the model numbers look like they came from a password generator and the only discernible difference without hours of looking at spec sheets is the price.
- robotresearcher 5y agoPlayStation. The name is brilliant and they’ve incremented the index each release since the first about 25 years ago. (I know it’s a different product category. It’s relevant because it’s name and number is perfect)
- fomine3 5y agoMost cryptic product number for consumer product I've ever know is Acer's monitors like XF270HBbmiiprx.
- LordDragonfang 5y agoSo that OEMs can keep selling their 5 year old chip designs at the same margins while their manufacturing costs plummet.
- opan 5y agoCombined with generation it says plenty. It's unfortunate when the public doesn't understand. I'm not sure what should be done. It is worth noting that if you think GPU model numbers are fine, CPUs are actually very similar. There's the 2600k, 3770k, etc. (sandy bridge and ivy bridge CPUs respectively) The first number goes up each generation and the rest is how powerful it is within the generation. Similar to Nvidia having a GTX 980 and later a GTX 1080.
- wink 5y agoI get your point and it's only 5 years but my i5-7300HQ and i7-3520M were pretty comparable due to the number of cores, despite what pure benchmark numbers would say (and I'd actually prefer that i7)