Intel Simplifies Their Branding By Making it More Complicated, Kind of Like This Title. 

This will make it super easy for prebuilt companies to sell bad procesdors for way too much.

scammers and scalpers are going to have a field day with these confusing names.

Intel looked at AMD's mobile naming scheme and thought: "I could do worse than that."

Ah yes, the Intel Core 7-1070K, not to be confused with the Intel Core i7-10700K

What gets me about the "ultra" names is that they put the ultra before the number instead of after. What does "core ultra 5" mean, a product that's even more... 5? It should have at least been "core 5 ultra."

"What the fuck is a razorblade" - well this was a strange way to learn that Linus only has a beard because he doesn't know about shaving.

The old naming system was so useful. You could suggest a CPU so easily to someone with no technical knowledge.

Intel: *has a naming system which works perfectly* Intel: lets make it stupid

Took me a moment to remember that the Razer Blade was a laptop. So you know, effective marketing.

can't wait until Intel renames the lineup again to Intel 5. 5 what? we don't know! as a company it's our job to make sure it's as hard as possible for you to choose a product

Intel decided to take the worst of Apple, AMD, and USB terminology and mash it together

I god damn hate that every company now has to have something like superduperultraplusmax in their product names...

I got "ebay-ed" in the sense that, since Dell stopped putting model numbers on Inspirons and only call them "Inspiron 14", someone had something completely different than what they thought. This was combined with what Ebay does with auto-complete when typing a title.

Oh, removing the generation in the marketing will be a field trip for scammers. It already happened a lot in my country with current naming scheme where a non savvy customer getting ripped for an i7, not knowing it was first gen.

You're so right about Apple's BS. I'm trying to replace the battery on my wife's old MacBook Pro and it's effing stupid. I can't look at "About this Mac" to find out what the hell it is, because it won't boot. So I'm left with a tiny model number buried among the femto-scale text on the bottom of the chassis, to find out it's actually one of three different possible configurations. Only by looking at the iFixit teardowns of the three models, can I tell which one it is. And that's before I discover it's a fifty-step process to replace the GDMFing battery (Literally. Fifty. Steps.) that involves removing every single component and drenching the case in solvent. And another 50 steps to put it all back together. The whole thing is one big middle finger to the customer.

In the not so distant future Buyer - " So what kind of spec does this laptop have?" Website - " It ...err... It just work.."

Intel's Branding is trying to get Apple-like Branding to make it simplier for idiots but it was easy to say i3 was low-end and i9 was high-end.

Something I never realized until my aunt was asking about what kind of laptop she should get. She didn't give a hoot about the big number. To her, an i5 7700 is the same as an i5 13408 because they're both an "i5".

Call me stupid, but one of the reasons i chose to get intel processors for my builds was because i had an intuitive understanding of how their processor names correlated to performance. I could feel confident in what i was getting. Maybe after this change ill only be confident in shopping for AMD processors, thanks intel.

I remember when it was the Intel Core 2 Duo era, people were confused about how many cores the CPU had. They wondered if the CPU had 4 cores, thinking that it has 2 cores and the duo is another 2 cores, it was only dual core. Looks like they didn't understand that there was Core 2 Quad

To me the Ultra/Not Ultra sounds like a rebrand of the HQ vs K vs H vs whatever else they used to have. I remember 2015-2016 laptops were a NIGHTMARE trying to research because if you didn’t notice the correct letter, or if the SEO guy of the blog article didn’t add it properly, your info would be completely skewed. But knowing Intel, they’ll pull an Nvidia and have “Core 9 Ultra 970 Mobile” which is worse than the “Core 7 Ultra 980” and both chips will be used in laptops for some reason

For this next generation ultra will mean being meteor lake, and non-ultra will be the raptor lake refresh. This is them covering up for the fact that they were having issues getting a full meteor lake lineup out. I’m sure they’ll say ‘oops, I guess you didn’t like that’ afterward and change it back once everything is back on track.

You know its bad when Apple branding is easier to understand.

Companies can name their products by release year but nah....

In Apple's (slight) defense, since moving to their own SoCs this has improved since M2 Pro is clearly newer than the M1 Pro.

They do it because the goal is to make naming confusing. They want to make comparing their products with each other as hard as possible, and it's somewhat of a trend now. Motorola is a nightmare, for example.

intel core 7 ultra super duper mega overclocked

My wild guess: They accepted that they'll probably be sitting on a lot of inventory going forward and can't really claim to sell "new n-th gen processors!", but will fill up their line up with previous gen stock. They probabaly already anticipate sitting on a ton of RPL that they can't sell in the current market, just like they were sitting on ADL dies when RPL came out. So they need marketing to make it so that customers can be dazzled with perf numbers from the new stuff, and go out and "accidentally" buy overpriced old ones Intel desperately needs to turn into money.

"Ultra" could just be the new word for "K" or overclockable.

In fairness to Apple, they have both Model Number (e.g. A2442) and Model Identifier (MacBookPro18,4), and the Model Number is printed on the bottom of the laptop. Also System Preference will give you the machine's year (that's not helpful if there were multiple updates in a year but it's become quite uncommon), and the System Report provides the model identifier.

Is the 5 Ultra better than the 7 non Ultra? As a non gamer or PC enthusiast CPUs have always confused me. Just have the Good, Better, Best structure.

If I had to guess, "Ultra" will indicate the CPU is overclockable and has slightly more E cores/frequency than the non-Ultra version (e.g i5-13600K vs i5-13400)

This is basically exactly what Apple were doing when they were still running x86 chips. You say "Intel i-something, goes really fast", and people go "okay cool". No mention of generation, no mention of which on-SoC features are omitted because of the model choice, nothing. Without literally opening the terminal and querying hardware information it was impossible to tell

when i buy a processor i care about architecture, generation and what tier it is assigned in the binning process (it could be the 3-5-7-9 system they use or do standard, performance, super, ultra). so core 14 ultra would be a 14th gen core processor equivalent to the i9. when looking to upgrade i just look at the generation number and know what im getting and whether or not its an upgrade, and then i aim for my usual performance tier. makes selecting a part so much easier.

This seems like a change made EXCLUSIVELY to confuse the average person buying a laptop.

I had this similar run in with the Acer Helio 300 series laptop I bought. No idea which version until I received it and looked up serial number

macs (all apple products) do have model numbers, they're not advertised but they're on the bottom and there's online databases for which is what. for instance, i have an A2816 mac mini.

This sounds like a good way to trick people into buying older chips

I'm sorry, it's infinitely easier to find out what model Mac you have than any other prebuilt PC.

Ultra is for the line-up of meteor lake which uses tile design, while non-ultra is for monolithic raptor lake refrsh. Core 9-1490K: raptor lake refresh; 8 +16 cores Core ultra 7-1470k: meteor lake; 6 + 8 cores

I once tried to find details on an iPad and it was a tough search.

Apple's naming of their own CPUs is trash. On the other hand, Apple's computer model designations aren't great, but they're damned simple to find. Click the Apple Menu. Click "About This Mac" macOS {version name} Version {version number} MacBook Pro (15-inch, (Early, Mid, Late) {year}) Given Apple's release cadence this is enough to firmly understand which model is which. That being said, most people don't know what model of computer they're using anyway. I have a Dell Precision notebook from work and I don't know what the model number is off the top of my head. I do remember the models of laptops which of our users use because I have to keep track of that as part of my job.

I recently tried to buy an AMD CPU for my moms Computer. I never had any AMD products before and briefly had informed myself about their graphics card lineup which after initial confusion was pretty easy to understand and similar to Nvidia's naming schemes. But the abyss that I looked into when I tried to understand how their CPU naming schemes are compiled was terrifying. I found a guide online which was much longer then needed and included three different graphics by AMD explaining naming schemes from zen 1-3, to Ryzen 5 and 7, 5000-7000 something. In the end I settled for some laptop with some Ryzen 7 5000 CPU without knowing what exactly I bought

I can help. Watch this. Intel C-Series 2023 Intel P-Series 2023 Intel G-Series 2023 Intel M-Series 2023 Intel X-Series 2023 C - Consumer P - Professional G - Gaming M - Mobile X - Extreme/Enthusiast Just advance the year and bang, easy to understand processor naming. Define what the standard is for each class and you're done.

"Dare to be stupid" has been playing on a loop at Intel Marketing HQ.

On a Mac - just click the  button in the MENU. Then About. Then you have ALL THE INFO including YEAR

Pretty much from my first PC I've always just checked the benchmarks and completely ignored the version number.

Reminds me of Audi replacing the engine badging on their models with just some arbitrary numbers. Previously you could buy things like an A3 1.8 TFSI, an A4 2.0 TDI or an A6 3.0 FSI (A3/A4/A6 being the model number and the rest referring to what's under the hood), but now you'd see stuff like an A3 30 TDI, A4 40 TFSI or A6 45 TFSI, where the A4 and A6 have exactly the same engine with slightly different software settings so the A6 falls into a slightly higher power category. Or if you're comparing an A3 35 TFSI and an A4 35 FSI, the A4 could have a completely different engine that makes similar power to the one in the A3 so they get the same number. It's not about what's under the hood anymore, all that matters is the brand.

Here is the thing, the average consumer already assumes that i9 is the best, and that i7 is really good. I flip PCs on the side, and I clearly advertise what CPU is in a system. I frequently get people surprised that I am selling an i7 system so cheaply because in their mind, a 4th gen i7 is better than a 12th gen i5 because it is an i7. When I buy old Macs I want to rip my hair out. People get upset when they tell you they have a MacBook Pro and you don't automatically know what ports are on the machine. To them a MacBook Pro is better than a MacBook, no matter the age.

At least for Apple, we know that M2 > M1

I was looking forward to getting a 14900k with my 4090 because the numbers kinda match…the numbering actually matters…mostly because it’s easy to see what a 10900k vs 13900k is

An Intel 1702 EPROM had a big letter "I" before the part number. This was before anyone else was putting "I" in front of stuff.

It could be worse, just look at the Pentium 4 naming scheme. But I do think the confusion is the point, it hurts to second hand market and makes it easier to sell older products. Get rid of generational branding and it gets easier to sell a 2 year old processor.

Some retailers end up listing the year next to apple products which tells you everything you need to know about how useful the name is.

I’m going to need a matrix to visualize the naming convention

As long as they keep the model numbers around, things can't get that bad... right?

Here I was thinking specialized medical equipment names were getting ridiculous. I will not complain anymore.

This is like that one subscription service i found that named its different subscriptions as Pro, Premium, and Deluxe.

who ever is part of their marketing team that made this change needs to be thrown off a rooftop everyone literally calls their processors an i3, i5 and i7 nobody calls it the whole name same way that people AMD processors as R3, R5 and R7 people want the simpler names not overly complicated bullshit . nobody currently ever calls the intel processors as just cores heck even even the good old Core2Duo/quad was called C2d or just Core2 or C2q nobody out there wanted this change and here I thought they wanted to get more sales and then they do crap like this.

"What does 'Ultra' mean?" You know Intel had soooo many meetings about that 🤣

Had a taste of this trying to figure out what model my work macbook was. I couldn't even find a year, all I could find was "i5", core count, and processor speed, and I had to just figure it out from that. Completely insane branding whose only point is to confuse consumers into overspending on something bad. Putting the "processor" before the number really shows how much they REALLY wanna devalue and obfuscate that part number, even to the point they'll make it sound stupid to do so

Damn it, I saw the title cut of at "kinda like this-" and I was so hoping for it to end in "-segue to our sponsor"

It looks to me that the Ultra is going to be attached to the K processors evident by the 5,7,9 and the non-i is for the non-k as they only show 3,5,7

google searching a razor blade might also get you the shaving implements

i thought they would go for a change after 9th gen came out. Then it wasnt a bad idea to change it with when P and E cores were first released. Now it makes little sense to me

I thought that the ultra branding was just to replace the X varients in their current branding. So the ultra labeled products support over clocking and the non-ultra are their locked processors

audiophile brands have cool and easier names to remember for example the company schiit such at the schiit loki and schiit ragnarok

I was buying my wife an iPad, and she was open to used, so I was browsing the used market and holy shit is it confusing, especially when the seller doesn’t specify which it is and barely knows. I almost wish she just wanted a new one lol

Here in India its always been that way ever since the core i bramding started. Companies only mention i3,i5,i7 on their marketing and you have to dig into details for the part number or core count. And the average person here doesnt know there's different tiers and generations within an i5 for example. Its sometimes hard and frustrating to explain this stuff when someone asks for a computer recommendation.

We should create a common processor classification form similar to the steam locomotive Whyte classification system. Like maybe a i9 13900k is 8p-16e-32T. But maybe we need to include the clockspeed and cache, because both the ryzen7 5800x and x3d are 8-16T. But maybe that's ok because it keeps it simple

That’s the beauty about Apple products. You just get one and it works so you don’t care what it is. But there are product codes and they’re easy to find. Though you rarely have a reason to do so.

And this is why we need LTT Labs to make sense out of the mess for the consumer.

Just in case someone is interested, "i" in BMW was standing for "injector" back in the days when not all cars had fuel injectors. Later they continue used it even when all cars start having injectors and it was kinda a sign for a petrol cars compare to diesel cars with "d" letter after the model number. Now with i3, i7, i8, ix -- "i" doesn't mean anything useful.

My favorite thing is how they branded the shittiest tier of processor they make "Intel Processor". Don't buy that one dude, it's got an Intel Processor, those things are dogshit.

Anyone that's ever went to an auto parts store for a headlight bulb or something will understand

"what does ultra mean" lol

Reminds me of trying to look up the specs for most Kingston ram. A bunch of numbers and letters and crap, but hardly ever outright says the capacity or the speed (the 2 most important things that should be specified). Drives me nuts!

I still remember the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

Can’t agree on the Apple hate in this instance. Every Apple device has a permanently unique model number right in the about this device settings section, as well as a individually unique serial number for your specific device, and you can also find information on your other devices even under iCloud. It is a lot better usable for finding and reporting exact details than any other comparable manufacturer. Intel Ark is certainly a good thing, and AMD is only slowly getting there, but try the same with some shitty laptop manufacturer, or god help you embedded devices, and you’re screwed. My least favourite thing to get information on are TVs. Completely incomprehensible model ranges, even without going back decades. Very little information beyond marketing talk, and rarely still available for older devices.

fucking hell the ultra in the core ultra 9 reminds me of amd not having non xt versions of their flagship skus like the 7900 series and the 6900 series.

I think their "ultra" designation is going to work similarly to the "X" variant on Ryzen CPUs or Nvidia's "TI" GPU variants.

This update to the processor names is going to help someone like me, who has never owned a PC and is looking at Treasure Boxes

my conclusion is for example lets use the same branding on 13th gen : 13400 will be core 5 1340 or 1040 13600k will be core 5 ultra 1360k or 1060k

i just received a macbook air from a friend. i checked the model under the laptop and it say A1369. the fun part is that it can be a Core 2 Duo or a Core i5 Sandy Bridge wtf keeping the model number for that ?????

Marketing managers sit around all day trying to figure out how to keep their job. They gotta change it to look useful

I can't tell you how many times I've come across people asking me about something and they mention they have an i5 and an nVidia 80 card. Like?????

On one hand I think it was time for them to change the naming, branding, sequence, etc. But, I don't like the "Core Ultra 9 Processor 1090K" or whatever. So Linus complained about the Xeon Bronze, etc branding, but I actually was thinking that might be a viable option for the CPUs... Core i9-15900K -> Core Titanium190K (then 290K for next gen, 390K and so on, gives a lot of room for generations to go up to 9790K, 9890K, 9990K, and no pulling an Nvidia and going 990K, 1090K, 2090K, 3090K, etc), or, optionally start with 4-digit like 1900K, 2900K, etc but then you only get 9 generations before you hit 5 digits again. Core i7-15700K -> Core Platinum 170K Core i5-15600K -> Core Gold 150K (5 = 5, not 6) Core i3-15300K -> Core Silver 130K Pentium / Celeron Gxxxx -> Core Bronze 110K (maybe, on that one) Or, what I would have preferred, is a complete shakeup of the branding, inventing a completely new name, like has happened before, with K# -> Athlon/Phenom -> FX -> Ryzen x86 -> Pentium -> Core Also I know this part is wishful thinking, but I'd like to see a bigger difference between the tiers and generations. For example, I presume there might be a perception among the less educated that "Core i7 is better / faster than Core i5" (using the old names for now), or, that "13th gen is better / faster than 12th gen". I would like to see BOTH of those be true, in their respective categories (yes, wishful dreaming, I know), as in... An ultra mobile (fanless, single-digit watt SOC) Core i7-14700Y or whatever would be faster than an HEDT Core i5-14600X under LHe on the same generation, and, An ultra mobile Atom / Celeron from, say, 15th gen (whatever number with -Y on the end) would be faster than eight Xeon Platinum 8x80M's from the same silicon as 14th gen. (Same with GPUs - I'd like to see a GT 5010 wipe the floor in FP64 with the top Quadro/Tesla/whatever the current branding is for the professional version of an RTX 4090 Ti. (Or, wipe the floor in gaming benchmarks such that the 5010 gets a higher fps in 3DMark Speedway than the 4090 Ti gets graphics score in Ice Storm.) Yes, I know this wishful thinking part isn't going to happen the way I described :) but I'd at least like us to see the industry quickly catch back up to where we would be if the rapid progression in the 1980s to 1990s hadn't slowed down, AND, better yet, either maintain the catch-up pace, or continue accelerating. 😂

Do a full video on official channel about it and add all companies that use it. Make it public globally with other ytbers.

Actually, ever since the switch to Apple Silicon, it’s actually much easier to know which model MacBook or IPad you Have. The first Gen Apple Silicon for Macs are M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra. Second Gen has M2, M2 Pro, M2 Max, M2 Ultra. Maybe the reason why no one knew what model MacBook had before was all Intels fault. 😂

My first iPad back in 2012 was the iPad 3, which was called “The New iPad”. Then 3~4 months later, Apple replaced it silently with “The New iPad” (Yes! Exactly the same name! AKA iPad 4) but this one was twice as fast as mine! I rest my case… Product names mean nothing…

Linus going on a rant about apple’s stupid naming scheme (it is pretty stupid) as if they do it on every product, but they don’t it’s literally just the macs Even AirPods have generation numbers and identifiers

all Intel had to do was start with a new series so they could stop using 14900k, with the P and E cores it should have started for example Intel I7 168 1 being the generation, 6 being the performance cores, and 8 being the efficiency cores so the customer knows what they are getting right away without any 2nd guessing.

And THIS is why LTT Labs is very very VERY important

Felt like Linus was channeling his Rossmann side in this one quite a bit.

This is so confusing I can’t tell what things are with these new names what would my i7 10700 he called?

When the second generation of the new naming comes out it will be even better! A first generation of ultra core 7 is better or a second gen non ultra core 5 kf?! Or amd xy, or evo and what is that pro series?

i always thought the i stood for Intel like i7 was short for intel 7.

A sure way to separate products is using a calendar date. As mentioned tho, unambiguous naming isn't a goal of cutthroat capitalism. Looking at products like cars, and comparing the time between releases, just a year would do it with most computer components.

Monitor naming system is even better

I don't quite get what the problem is. There's still a model number. Are you worried that the Intel Core sticker on the laptop won't mention "14th gen"'? Did they even still do that to this day?