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Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes
- tomcam 10mo agoHow dare they accuse Intel of any kind of naming scheme at all. Everyone who’s anyone knows it’s an act of stochastic terrorism.
- johng 10mo agoThis isn't that bad if you compare it to the USB naming fiasco... but yeah, definitely a problem in the tech industry for a long time.
- sofixa 10mo agoNot really comparable. With Intel's confusing socket naming, you can buy a CPU that doesn't fit the socket. With USB, the physical connection is very clearly the first part of the name. You cannot get it wrong. Yeah, the names aren't the most logical or consistent, but USB C or A or Micro USB all mean specific things and are clearly visibly different. The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work.
- dataflow 10mo ago> The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work. I don't know what "always work" means here but I feel like I've had USB cables that transmit zero data because they're only for power, as well as ones that don't charge the device at all when the device expects more power than it can provide. The only thing I haven't seen is cables that transmit zero data on some devices but nonzero data on others.
- dtech 10mo agoI don't think those cables are in spec, and there are a lot of faulty devices and chargers that don't conform to the spec creating these kinds of problem (e.g. Nintendo Switch 1). This is especially a problem with USB C. You can maybe blame USB consortium for creating a hard spec, but usually it's just people saving $0.0001 on the BOM by omitting a resistor.
- LoganDark 10mo ago> But it will always work. I can't find a USB-C PD adapter for a laptop that uses less than 100W. As a result, I can't charge a 65W laptop from a 65W port because the adapter doesn't even work unless the port is at least 100W. It does not always work.
- seszett 10mo agoFor this specific issue I'm surprised, I have used all kinds of USB PD chargers for my laptops and all of them but one are less than 100W, with no problem at all. The ones I use most are 20W and 40W, just stuff I ordered from AliExpress (Baseus brand I think).
- LoganDark 10mo agoThis laptop uses a weird barrel jack so I have to try to find something USB-C-to-this-specific-barrel-jack. So far I haven't found anything that doesn't require 100w, as everything on the planet is just rebrands from the exact same Chinese factory.
- zx8080 10mo agoI've noticed that GAN PD's 100w and 65w adapters output is actually less (both do not charge my laptop) than lenovo 65w charger (the one with a non-detachable usbc cable). Cable does not matter, tried with many of them including ones providing power from other chargers. It seems totally random, and you cannot rely on watts anymore.
- unsnap_biceps 10mo agoI have a dell laptop that uses a usbc port to charge, but doesn't actually use the PD specification, but a custom one, so my 65w GAN charger falls back to 5v 0.5a and isn't useful at all. I'd bet dollars to donuts that your Lenovo is doing similar shit.
- zx8080 10mo agoNo. It can charge from my monitor PD just fine. And wow, I'll keep away from Dell, thanks.
- Arrowmaster 10mo agoI don't think the port names is what they were referring to. The actual names for each data transfer level are an absolute mess. 1.x has Low Speed and Full Speed 2.0 added High Speed 3.0 is SuperSpeed (yes no space this time) 3.1 renamed 3.0 to 3.1 Gen 1 and added SuperSpeedPlus 3.2 bumped the 3.1 version numbers again and renamed all the SuperSpeeds to SuperSpeed USB xxGbps And finally they renamed them again removing the SuperSpeed and making them just USB xxGbps USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't"
- zx8080 10mo ago> USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't" While not disagreeing, I'd ask for a proof it's not a marketing department's fun. Just to be sure. Engineers love consistency. Marketing is on the opposite side of this spectra.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago> USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't" Engineers don't make names that are nice for marketing team. But they absolutely do make consistent ones. The engineer wouldn't name it superspeed, the engineer would encode the speed in the name
- nottorp 10mo ago> the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal How polite. It can be useless, not "not optimal". Especially since usb-c can burn you on a combination of power and speed, not only speed.
- halapro 10mo ago> But it will always work Not at all. If you want to charge your phone, it might "always work", but if you want to use your monitor with USB hub and pass power to your MacBook, you're gonna have a hard time.
- numpad0 10mo agoUsers aren't supposed to be (choosing && swapping) CPUs by themselves between these identical sockets(LGA2011 v0 through v3). These are supposed to be bought in trays and kitted in a shop. So reusing same parts for cost saving should not cause issues. Consumer oriented sockets(LGA115x) has different notches and pin counts to prevent this issue - actually, some of "different" sockets in consumer oriented sockets with "different" chipsets are actually identical, and sometimes you see Chinese bastardized boards that use discarded server-marked chips and pins-fudged hacker builds online that should not be possible according to marketing materials, so there is their own rabbit hole there.
- GuB-42 10mo agoIt will always work if you want 500 mA at 5V and if 480 Mbps is sufficient (assuming everything is USB2 compatible nowadays). But sometimes the extra power or extra data transfer is not an option. For charging a laptop for instance, you typically need 20V, if your charger doesn't support that, you can't charge at all. And then there is Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, Oculink, where the devices that use these features won't work at all in an incompatible port. And I am not aware of device that strictly requires one of the many flavors of USB 3 or 4, but I can imagine a video capture card needing that. Raw video requires a lot of bandwidth.
- XCabbage 10mo agoHow did the title end up wrong on HN (schemes vs scenes) and what's the mechanism to get a mod to fix it?
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago> and what's the mechanism to get a mod to fix it? Email them, address is in the guidelines.
- rob74 10mo agoI assume someone typed it in (possibly on a mobile device with autocorrect) rather than copy & pasting it (which you would have to do twice, for the URL and for the title).
- tlb 10mo agoFixed, thanks
- bjackman 10mo agoI work in CPU security and it's the same with microarchitecture. You wanna know if a machine is vulnerable to a certain issue? - The technical experts (including Intel engineers) will say something like "it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models' - Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up). - The spec sheet for the hardware calls it a "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA" Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. They also have different names for the same shit depending on whether it's a consumer or server chip. Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version. Usually I just ask the LLM and accept that it's wrong 20% of the time.
- andrewf 10mo ago>"it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models' "Products formerly Blizzard Creek" WTF does that even mean?
- 7bees 10mo agoIntel doesn't like to officially use codenames for products once they have shipped, but those codenames are used widely to delineate different families (even by them!), so they compromise with the awkward "products formerly x" wording. Have done for a long time.
- orthoxerox 10mo agoI wouldn't mind them coming up with better codenames anyway. "Some lower-end SKUs branded as Raptor Lake are based on Alder Lake, with Golden Cove P-cores and Alder Lake-equivalent cache and memory configurations." How can anyone memorize this endless churn of lakes, coves and monts? They could've at least named them in the alphabetical order.
- tormeh 10mo agoThe entire point of code names is that you can delay coming up with a marketing name. If the end user sees the code name then what is even the point? Using the code name in external communication is really really dumb. They need to decide if it should be printed on the box or if it's only for internal use, and don't do anything in between.
- ocdtrekkie 10mo agoIn fairness, the author should've known something was up when they thought they could put a multiple year newer chip in an Intel board. That sort of cross-generational compatibility may exist in AMD land but never in Intel.
- mort96 10mo agoI mean sure, that would seem suspicious. But not suspicious enough that I'd likely have caught the problem. It's not that far fetched that Intel may occasionally make new CPUs for older sockets, and when Intel's documentation for the motherboard says "uses socket FCLGA2011" and Intel's documentation for the CPU says "uses socket FCLGA2011", I too would have assumed that they use the same socket.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- userbinator 10mo agoIt sounds like you've never heard of Socket 370 or Slot 1.
- justsomehnguy 10mo agoIt sound like you've successfully inserted Tualeron into BP6 and it worked out of the box.
- justsomehnguy 10mo agome: looks at the updoots me: mueheheh
- justinclift 10mo agoThe author would likely be able to put a v3 generation processor in the motherboard, they just didn't do the necessary research to find that out before pulling the trigger.
- 7bees 10mo agoIt has pretty much always been the case that you need to make sure the motherboard supports the specific chip you want to use, and that you can't rely on just the physical socket as an indicator of compatibility (true for AMD as well). For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips. OEM stuff like this can be more of a crapshoot. All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets. LGA to indicate it's land grid array (CPU has flat "lands" on it, pins are on the motherboard), 2011 because it has 2011 pins. FC because it's flip chip packaging.
- duskwuff 10mo ago> All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets. That's an industry-wide standard across all IC manufacturing - Intel doesn't really get to take credit for it.
- tristor 10mo ago> For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips. Ah, but if you want to buy a newly released CPU and the board does support/work with it, but nobody has updated the documentation on the website: How do you know? Ultimately it's always a crapshoot. Some manufacturers don't even provide release notes with their BIOS updates... Back in the day, this is what forums were for. Unfortunately forums are dead, Facebook is useless, and Google search sucks now. So you should just buy it, if it doesn't work ask for a refund and if they refuse just do a chargeback.
- monster_truck 10mo agoLGA2011 was an especially cursed era of processors and motherboards. In addition to all of the slightly different sockets there was ddr3, ddr3 low voltage, the server/ecc counterparts, and then ddr4 came out but it was so expensive (almost more expensive than 4/5 is now compared to what it should be) that there were goofy boards that had DDR3 & DDR4 slots. By the way it is _never_ worth attempting to use or upgrade anything from this era. Throw it in the fucking dumpster (at the e waste recycling center). The onboard sata controllers are rife with data corruption bugs and the caps from around then have a terrible reputation. Anything that has made it this long without popping is most likely to have done so from sitting around powered off. They will also silently drop PCI-E lanes even at standard BCLK under certain utilization patterns that cause too much of a vdrop. This is part of why Intel went damn-near scorched earth on the motherboard partners that released boards which broke the contractual agreement and allowed you to increase the multipliers on non-K processors. The lack of validation under these conditions contributed to the aformentioned issues.
- lachiflippi 10mo ago>and allowed you to increase the multipliers on non-K processors Wasn't this the other way around, allowing you to increase multipliers on K processors on the lower end chipsets? Or was both possible at some point? I remember getting baited into buying an H87 board that could overclock a 4670K until a bios update removed the functionality completely.
- kasabali 10mo agoShould be so, multiplier is locked at cpu level not firmware.
- ryukoposting 10mo agoOh don't worry, the horrors are returning! https://www.techpowerup.com/343672/asrock-h610m-combo-motherboard-accepts-ddr5-ddr4-dimms https://www.techpowerup.com/343672/asrock-h610m-combo-mother...
- Rakshath_1 10mo ago[flagged]
- arein3 10mo agowell if you buy Intel you should expect incompatible sockets at any step, so that's on you on the other side AMD with legendary AM4
- kwanbix 10mo agoI don't know why, but most tech companies are horrible at naming products.
- agos 10mo agoyou know, there are two hard problems in computer science...
- mcny 10mo agoFor today's lucky ten thousand, the joke is that > There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, off-by-one errors.
- baklazan 10mo agoWhy do people say that, when the number one hardest problem is making good abstractions?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- deathanatos 10mo agoThis reminds me of my ASRock motherboard, though this was over a decade ago now. The actual board was one piece of hardware, but the manual it shipped with was for a different piece of hardware. Very similar, but not identical (and worse, not identical where I needed them to be, which, naturally, is both the only reason I noticed and how these things get noticed…), but yet both manual and motherboard had the same model number. ASRock themselves appeared utterly unaware that they had two separate models wandering around bearing the same name, even after it was pointed out to them. The next motherboard (should RAM ever cease being the tulip du jour) will not be an ASRock, for that and other reasons. For the love of everything though, just increment the model number.
- valexiev 10mo agoSounds like a great candidate for a Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph.
- nnevatie 10mo agoDo you think Intel names things poorly? NVidia has these, very different GPUs: Quadro 6000, Quadro RTX 6000, RTX A6000, RTX 6000 Ada, RTX 6000 Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Max-Q Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Server Edition
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoless worse. It would be like having Quadro 6000 and 6050 be completely different generation
- g947o 10mo agoAh, I see who you are insinuating
- black3r 10mo agoThere are GPUs from 3 different generations in that list... Quadro 6000 is an old Fermi from 2010, Quadro RTX6000 is Turing from 2018, RTX6000 Ada is Ada from 2022... Oh and there's also RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell which is Blackwell from 2025...
- jerf 10mo agoI gave up understanding GPU names a long time ago. Now I just hope the efficient market hypothesis is at least moderately effective and as long as I buy from a reputable retailer the price is at least mostly reflective of performance. They've hyperoptimized all these marketing buzzwords to the point that I'm basically forced into the moral equivalent of buying GPU by the pound because I have no idea what these marketers are trying to tell me anymore. The only stat I really pay attention to is VRAM size. (If you are one of those marketers, this really ought to give you something to think about. Unless obfuscation is the goal, which I definitely can not exclude based on your actions.)
- masklinn 10mo agoThe GeForce 700 series came in 3 different microarchitectures. Most were on Kepler but there were several fermi (the previous uarch) and a few mobile chips used maxwell (the following architecture). Lest anyone think AMD is any better the Radeon 200 series came in everything from terascale 2 (4 years old at that point) to GCN3. The gpu manufacturers have also engaged in incredible amounts of rebadging to pad their ranges, some cores first released on the GeForce 8000 series got rebadged all the way until the 300 series.
- MadameMinty 10mo agoThat reminds me when I got a server-grade Xeon E5472 (LGA771) and after some very minor tinkering (knife, sticker mod) fit it into a cheap consumer-grade LGA775 socket. Same microarchitecture, power delivery class, all that. LGA2011-0 and LGA2011-1 are very unalike, from the memory controller to vast pin rearrangement. So not only they call two different sockets almost the same per the post, but they also call essentially the same sockets differently to artificially segment the market.
- kosolam 10mo agoWow $15 for that CPU sounds great.
- titaniumtown 10mo agoYea, old server hardware can be super cheap! In my opinion though, the core counts are misleading. Those 24 cores are not compareable to the cores of today. Plus IPC+power usage are wildly different. YMMV on if those tradeoffs are worth it.
- cyral 10mo agoWild that it was released in 2016 for almost $9,000
- mlsu 10mo agoUntil you see your electricity bill.
- Yizahi 10mo agoYeah, Intel has some crazies in the naming department since they abandoned Netburst with clear generation number and frequency in the name. I remember having two CPUs with exact same name E6300 for the exact same socket LGA775, but the difference was 1 GHz and cache size. Like, ok, I can understand that they were close enough, but at least add something to the model number to distinguish them.
- shortercode 10mo agoI recall standing in CEX one day perusing the cabinet of random electronics ( as you do ) and wondering why the Intel CPUs were so cheap compared to the AMD ones. I eventually concluded that the cross generation compatibility of zen cpus meant they had a better resale value. Whereas if you experienced the more common mobo failure with an Intel chip you were likely looking at replacing both.
- Suggger 10mo agoIt's fascinating how 'Naming Schemes' are supposed to clarify hierarchy but end up creating more chaos. When the signifier (FCLGA2011) detaches from the signified (physical compatibility), the system is officially broken. Feels like a hardware version of a bureaucratic loop.
- PaulHoule 10mo agoThey have to make “shit creek” to put a end to all those water bodies.
- cindyllm 10mo ago[dead]
- pkphilip 10mo agoIntel and AMD naming schemes are extremely confusing these days. I can understand that naming these things must be really complicated these days since we have different core counts, thread counts, different types of cores, different clock speeds etc, but still
- vladde 10mo agoat least they are not renaming retroactively. looking at you USB 3.0 (or USB 3.1 Gen 1 (or USB 3.2 Gen 1))
- Corrado 10mo agoAWS just renamed their Security Hub service to Security Hub CSPM and then created a new service named Security Hub that is related but completely different than the original service.
- kjs3 10mo agoAnd there's AWS S3, and there's AWS Glacier. And there's AWS S3, Glacier storage tier, which isn't Glacier. Which is OK, because Glacier is going away, and you should use S3, Glacier tier. Unless you're already using it, in which case you can still use it. So you still have to know Glacier and Glacier, while both storing your data, aren't technically the same thing. But if you think that's bad, you haven't seen the name change shenanigans Microsoft pulls in Azure.
- yonatan8070 10mo agoSince everyone is complaining about the naming schemes of CPUs, I'll pitch in. An Intel Core Ultra 7 155U and a Core Ultra 7 155H, are very different classes of CPUs! If you're comparing laptops, you'll see both listed, and laptops with the U variant will be significantly cheaper, because you get half the max TDP, 4 fewer cores, 8 fewer threads, and a worse GPU. This isn't to say the 155U is a bad chip, it's just a low-power optimized chip, while the 155H is a high-performance chip, and the difference between their performance characteristics is a lot larger than you'd expect when looking at the model numbers. Heck, if you didn't know better, you might text your tech-savvy friend "hey is a 155 good?", and looking that up would bring up the powerful H version.
- the_pwner224 10mo agoAnd the 285H is lower performance than a 275HX. Their laptop naming scheme at least is fairly straightforward once you figure it out. U = Low-TDP, for thin & light devices H = For higher-performance laptops, e.g. Dell XPS or midrange gaming laptops HX = Basically the desktop parts stuffed into a laptop form factor, best perf but atrocious power usage even at idle. Only for gaming laptops that aren't meant to be used away from a desk. And within each series, bigger number is better (or at least not worse - 275HX and 285HX are practically identical).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- E39M5S62 10mo agoDon't forget the V series in there. I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 258V in my Thinkpad. I think they're still being made. I bought an open box Thinkpad T14s Gen 6 with it - they come with a nicer GPU than the Ultra 7 255U.
- wtallis 10mo agoThe V series is a one-off thing Intel did, but they don't have a direct successor planned. Previously, they had a P series of mobile parts in between the U and H series (Alder Lake and Raptor Lake). Before that, they had a different naming scheme for the U series equivalents (Ice Lake and Tiger Lake). Before that, they had a Y series for even lower power than U series. So they mix up their branding and segmentation strategy to some extent with almost every generation, but the broad strokes of their segmentation have been reasonably consistent over the past decade.
- D13Fd 10mo agoI agree their name scheme sucks. But the way to buy a new CPU is to check with the motherboard vendor about what CPUs the motherboard supports. You can't expect it to work (although it may) if the motherboard maker doesn't list it as supported. Having some portion of the socket name stay the same can still be helpful to show that the same heatsinks are supported. I agree there are many far better ways Intel could handle this.
- baden1927 10mo agoCross-socket E7-8890 v4/Socket LGA2011-1 GPU/CPU extensions for Blackwell 100.
- mrandish 10mo agoBecause I don't follow CPUs constantly and only check in from time to time, all the code names (for cores, CPUs and platforms), generations, marketing names, model numbers, etc make it hopelessly confusing. And it's not just Intel but AMD and other companies have been doing this chronically for >10 years. It seems almost like intentional obfuscation yet I can't really think of a long-term reason that creating confusion systemically is in the company's interest. Sure, every company occasionally has a certain generation they might like to forget but that's too unpredictable to be the motivation behind such a consistent long-term pattern. So I suspect maybe it's just a perverse effect of successive generations of marketing and product managers each coming up with a new system "to fix the confusion?" What's strange is that there's enough history here that smart people should be able to recognize there's a chronic problem and address it. For example, relatively simple patterns like Era Name (like "Core"), Generation Number, Model Number - Speed and then a two digit sub-signifier for all the technical variants. Just two digits of upper case letters and digits 1-9 is enough to encode >1200 sub-variants within each Era/Gen/Model/Speed. The maddening part is that they not only change the classifiers, they also sometimes change the number and/or hierarchy of classifiers, which eliminates any hope of simply mapping the old taxonomy to the new.
- kccqzy 10mo agoTech journalism should help. It’s basically curation. I also don’t follow CPUs constantly. When I need to buy CPUs, I go to a few publications (say Ars Technica), search their archives for discussions of CPUs published within the last two years and see what the editors think. Of course it’s only a solution if you are buying. If you writing low-level software for these outside userspace, I suppose you’ll have to follow the development of CPUs.
- m463 10mo agoI wonder if the AMD am4 and am5 stuff has issues like this?
- decryption 10mo agoI have been stung by the exact same socket name bullshit from Intel and it is infuriating.