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Intel Names Upcoming Chips
Phooey42 writes "USA Today is reporting that Intel has finally announced names for their new set of desktop and notebook processor lines, previously dubbed Conroe and Merom. The new chips for both the desktop and laptop lines will be dubbed "Core 2 Duo", whereas their new "premium processor" for high end desktop users will be called the "Core 2 Extreme". Knowing Intel, who would have ever thought that the successor to the Core Duo would be the Core 2 Duo!?"
Intel has recently come up with a series of totally unoriginal and ultimately confusing names for their CPUs.
For example, the "Core Duo" is a pretty unoriginal name for a dual core processor, and I've seen a lot of people start referring to dual core CPUs as "DuoCore" or other such nonsense.
Core 2 Duo? Talk about redundant and confusing naming...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'm pretty sure the CPU makers quit caring about the general public's level of understanding about their processors a while ago. It used to be pretty simple, really. You had a primary name of a CPU and then a Mhz speed rating. That was apparently too much for many consumers to comprehend - judging by how many folks had no idea how many generations of Pentiums there were. (EG. "Isn't there a Pentium 5 now, or is the Pentium 4 the best one out?")
But these days, processor sales are geared towards the system builders and enthusiasts. Basically, it's up to Dell or HP or your local "mom and pop" system builder to choose an appropriate CPU for a given machine, and then to sell it on its merits to an end-user.
Really, with all the obfuscation of the true speeds of CPUs lately, not to mention all the variants with different numbers of pins on a socket, different amounts of internal cache, etc. - it seems like they're trying hard to ensure the "average user" *can't* understand exactly where the CPU they own benchmarks relative to the others.
the problem with generic product names here, though, is that they lack a logical increment signifier in a strongly incremental field -- with cars, you have a very simple system: car line, plus model year -- you know Q-Turbo9000 2006 came after the 2005. But tell me now: which is newer/faster? Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955? Intel Pentium 4 670? Intel Pentium M 770? Intel Xeon 3.0? the numbers run differently in every line, with no discernable (to the consumer) relation.