Intel announces biggest processor rebranding in 15 years ahead of Meteor Lake launch

[midian182]

Why it matters: The reports are true – Intel is rebranding its consumer CPU lineup with the launch of the new Core and Core Ultra processors, starting with the upcoming release of Meteor Lake. Disappearing is the familiar "I" from the previous generation Core i3, i5, i7, and i9; they will now be known as Intel Core or Intel Core Ultra 3/5/7/9.

Intel's rebrand doesn't come as a surprise. Someone spotted a Core Ultra 5 in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark database in May, the same month a Core Ultra 7 CPU was found in the Puget Bench Lightroom benchmark. Even Intel has confirmed it would be rebranding once Meteor Lake arrives.

Intel calls this overhaul the company's most significant in years. It appears that Meteor Lake – Intel's first chips to use a multi-tile rather than monolithic design and manufactured on the new Intel 4 process node – was chosen as a starting point because, as the company puts it, the 14-generation CPUs represent an inflection point for design, manufacturing, and architecture.

Starting with Meteor Lake's launch later this year, there will be two Intel client CPU SKUs: the mainstream Intel Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7 chips; and the "Premium" processors, presumably the higher-end models, which will be called the Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7, and Core Ultra 9.

Reports that Intel would be dropping the "I" part of the processor branding, which has been around since the release of the Nehalem microarchitecture in November 2008, haven't been welcomed by everyone. Many people when talking about Intel's chips call them an "i5" or "i7" for brevity. It might take a while to get used to calling them Core or Core Ultra and not using the letter I.

The other big change is Intel splitting the processors into mainstream and premium groups. The rebrand is meant to simplify the company's portfolio, so it could be that introducing the 'Ultra' moniker is meant to make things easier for non-tech-savvy types, though it'll likely be less welcome by others.

Elsewhere, Intel will no longer be stating what generation a chip is from in front of its Core brands. That means we won't be seeing, for example, "Intel 14-gen Core Ultra 9 14900K" in the marketing. However, the CPU's generation will remain in the processor number (e.g. 14xxx).

Team Blue also emphasized that its Intel Arc graphics cards can be paired with both Core and Core Ultra processors. A recent Jon Peddie Research report on the state of the graphics card industry showed that while Nvidia remains the dominant force by far, Intel has gained a 4% share of the market.

Finally, Intel says it is evolving the Intel Evo Edition platform brand for Evo-verified designs and introducing Intel vPro Enterprise and Intel vPro Essentials device labels for relevant commercial systems.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99067-intel-announces-biggest-processor-rebranding-15-years-ahead.html

 

[Manuel Diego]

The more you fear for your products, the more ultra they become: that's an admission of lack of competitiveness!

 

[wiyosaya]

I bet Intel thinks this new marketing shtick will sell more processors. It probably will to the technically illiterate, but not to anyone who has a modicum of technical knowledge. Intel has fallen so far behind, they cannot figure out a way to regain their "leadership" if you want to call piddling, lazy, performance increases for outrageous increases in prices generation over generation in the last 10 - 15-year "leadership".

My advice to Intel, get off your lazy a$$es and over-inflated egos.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

The 3/5/7/9 told non-techies relative performance.

Now we have
is Ultra 5 > 7 ???

Unless Ultra means better iGPU it is totally nonsensical.

 

[winjer]

This is a really stupid rebrand.
They might as well just use "turbo" and "laser".

 

[Vulcanproject]

Intel dropped the "I."

Now all I can think about is the 1982 song "I won't let you down, won't let you down again"

They should listen to this plea and realise their mistake

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

This is a really stupid rebrand.
They might as well just use "turbo" and "laser".

I see a lot of comments like this, but actually I think it makes it clearer assuming they're matching the Y, U, H, S and X-series lines. Y = Mobile, U = Ultra(book), S = Standard, H = Hyper, and X = Extreme all are way easier to remember and more descriptive. Plus it means you don't have to dig into product specifications every time you want to find out which series of processor it carries because it'll now be in the name.

 

[wiyosaya]

Intel dropped the "I."

Now all I can think about is the 1982 song "I won't let you down, won't let you down again"

They should listen to this plea and realise their mistake

Intel probably thinks that they cannot make mistakes.

 

[wiyosaya]

Plus it means you don't have to dig into product specifications every time you want to find out which series of processor it carries because it'll now be in the name.

IMO, that remains to be seen.

 

[Bobbydpue]

I bet Intel thinks this new marketing shtick will sell more processors. It probably will to the technically illiterate, but not to anyone who has a modicum of technical knowledge. Intel has fallen so far behind, they cannot figure out a way to regain their "leadership" if you want to call piddling, lazy, performance increases for outrageous increases in prices generation over generation in the last 10 - 15-year "leadership".

My advice to Intel, get off your lazy a$$es and over-inflated egos.

This sounds like a person who feel personally attacked by a company that doesn't even know they exist. How has Intel fallen behind? Also what ego? Do you remember how much the 1800x cost at launch?
Intel was held back by their foundry and the difficulty with making CPUs while AMD sold their foundry and paid someone else to manufacture their CPUs. Intel's foundry couldn't keep up with their CPU designerm, but they've moved over to 10nm a while back and will be moving to a multi-tile design with this new generation. What what are you mad about?

What CPU did AMD have in the same price range as the 12400? Do you remember how much the 1800x cost when it came out?

Why are you so angry? None of these tech companies cares about you or any of us. If the prices were too high, too few people would pay that price and the prices would go down. Look at the prices of the Ryzen 1800x they dropped shortly after launch and then kept dropping until enough people started buying them. Don't like a product at the retail price? You have more than Intel to be mad at. You have all the other people who spent their own money on the thing you couldn't justify spending your money on. And that's why GPU prices are so high, because enough people bought the previous overpriced graphics cards letting NVIDIA and AMD know they priced them high enough, but not too high.

Why are you posting such an angry rant under an article about marketing for a new CPU family very few know any specifics about? Are you mad about the performance of a product that doesn't exist, yet?

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

IMO, that remains to be seen.

Okay no, I was completely wrong. It's exactly what it sounds like--they're just going to have Core 3/5/7 and Core Ultra 5/7/9 (and Evo and vPro). Furthermore they're going to drop the generation number from the product names and instead put the processor number at the end of the name. If retailers follow that convention, that'll work fine for me. Anyways here is the actual source from Intel:
Announcement - https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...brand-update-upcoming-meteor-lake-launch.html
Slide deck - https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2023/client-computing/Intel-Brand-Update-Media-Deck.pdf

 

[punctualturn]

The only good Intel is a dead one.

Die Intel Die!!

 

[GeorgeSorosSmell]

The more you fear for your products, the more ultra they become: that's an admission of lack of competitiveness!

Intel are currently more cost effective excluding Amds 3D cache and with their current architecture ARR giving people better performance than AMD due to AMDS 30% price hike on all their products.

They are currently selling more as well and and is only dominating in the High Budget Premium chip area with Intel dominating mid and low range in regards to value prolosition, you seem to be stuck in 2014.

Intel's node with meteor is more competive than AMDS, excluding their 3D cache chips. This change makes perfect sense, there is a massive difference between some I3, i5 and i7 processors in performance, some i5s from Intel on the lower budget range where considerably weaker than their higher end chips

 

[GeorgeSorosSmell]

I bet Intel thinks this new marketing shtick will sell more processors. It probably will to the technically illiterate, but not to anyone who has a modicum of technical knowledge. Intel has fallen so far behind, they cannot figure out a way to regain their "leadership" if you want to call piddling, lazy, performance increases for outrageous increases in prices generation over generation in the last 10 - 15-year "leadership".

My advice to Intel, get off your lazy a$$es and over-inflated egos.

Intel is currently dominating mid Range and budget areas, your living in a different planet, and hiked their prices up 30% and since with big little archecteture they have been dominating ever since excluding amds 3D cache chips, Amds boards are more expensive and currently are plagued with issues, exploding CPUs extreme ram pickiness ect, any searches on amds current gen proves this. Its not Intel being lazy, its amd.

Its not a matter of just marketing it makes complete sense. This change makes perfect sense, there is a massive difference between some I3, i5 and i7 processors in performance, some i5s from Intel on the lower budget range where considerably weaker than their higher end chips

 

[jbelkin]

Basically, Apple-like branding ...

 

[zulu53]

Should also adjust the generation number to match the current Gregorian calendar year; instead of forcing the user to add 10. Unless, of course, the idea is to get away from annual releases (which I hope they do - the concept that "improvements" beyond superficial ones can be done annually is marketing think not engineering think. Of course this would also reduce the media workload since they would have little to do between release of "new" but not new products).

 

[error1984]

I don't "smell" this is a bad idea. Better than cheesy "super"

 

[hazphan]

This is a really stupid rebrand.
They might as well just use "turbo" and "laser".

American Gladiators themed processors, I like it:
https://american-gladiators.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_gladiators

 

[BobHome]

No 'I' but the word 'Ultra'? Just use 'U' - U5 (or 5U, your choice).
There, solved.

 

[pcnthuziast]

Wack AF.

 

[loki1944]

Sounds like a move aimed at a market audience from Idiocracy.

 

[poshflamingos]

How has Intel fallen behind?

He isn't wrong on this, Intel is significantly behind AMD and Apple in power efficiency. This is masked on the desktop market where power consumption is not that critical and they can make up for it by using very high TDPs (I.e. selling 250W furnaces like the 13900K), but in the markets where it matters it's pretty clear Intel has a big disadvantage. They're bleeding marketshare to AMD in the server/enterprise market, and they get humiliated by both AMD and Apple on mobile, especially in the ultraportable category, where the Apple M series and the Ryzen U series run circles around Intel's 15W chips.

What CPU did AMD have in the same price range as the 12400?

The Ryzen 5600.

 

[Kashim]

Am I the only one who feels this move stinks of desperation? What was that saying, you can polish a turd but it's still going to be a turd?

 

[hwertz]

"Team Blue also emphasized that its Intel Arc graphics cards can be paired with both Core and Core Ultra processors."

So, I read a while ago about this company starting to sell ARM workstations -- 128-core ARM in a proper motherboard with PCIe slots and plenty of RAM expandability and all that good stuff. Someone asked them "So, ARMs usually have weak GPUs, what are you doing about that?" (And, indeed, this ARM had some tablet-based GPU built onto the chip.) "Well, it's got PCIe slots, and Nvidia has had Linux ARM drivers for years, we put an RTX 4090 in it."

So virtually every other GPU besides Nvidia runs in Linux on fully-open source drivers (and have run successfully on non-x86/x86-64 architectures going back to the first one Linux supported, the DEC Alpha back in the 1990s... which used standard PC video cards.)

Wouldn't it be a bit twisted to set up an ARM desktop with an Intel ARC GPU in it? But, it's highly likely it'd work out of the box.

 

[hwertz]

He isn't wrong on this, Intel is significantly behind AMD and Apple in power efficiency. This is masked on the desktop market where power consumption is not that critical and they can make up for it by using very high TDPs (I.e. selling 250W furnaces like the 13900K), but in the markets where it matters it's pretty clear Intel has a big disadvantage. They're bleeding marketshare to AMD in the server/enterprise market, and they get humiliated by both AMD and Apple on mobile, especially in the ultraportable category, where the Apple M series and the Ryzen U series run circles around Intel's 15W chips.


The Ryzen 5600.

Indeed. I went from a Ryzen 3050U to a 11th gen Intel (the lowest end dual-core model, 1115G4). The dual core is no slouch (largely thanks to being able to burst to 4.2ghz) but it is certainly a bit power-hungry, and the GPU is quite power-hungry. The newer systems have a mix of performance and efficiency cores, but the power cores are quite power-hungry, and the efficiency cores are a slow N3050/Atom based thing, AMD cleans their clock in terms of performance per watt.