Today, Intel introduces a new processor for the essential product space: Intel Processor. The new offering will replace the Intel Pentium and Intel Celeron branding in the 2023 notebook product stack.
Those are some old, long-standing brands Intel just put out to pasture. “Intel Processor” will exist next to the Core i product lines as budget processors, just like Pentium and Celeron do today.
How does that simplify things? I mean I never really knew which was better Pentium of Celeron, but I don’t think I’ll magically be able tell that now with a single Intel Processor branding. What I do think is that, there will be less people asking them what the difference is between the two. And maybe that right there is the point.
Just buy a “Ryzen”, it’s better anyway.
Pentium, traditionally. Lately, the people in charge of segmentation at Intel have been been on a massive bender, and it hasn’t made much sense.
The i parts have had to pick up features to compete with AMD, and it’s put the Celeron and Pentium CPUs in a weird spot. They also do duty in specific server and networking niches which muddies the waters even more.
Just buy AMD, only 2 choices, Athlon and Ryzen. Athlon is for the cheapos, Ryzen for the mainstream and frankly in 2022 even the Athlon is more capable than the Celeron and low end Pentiums which is probably why Intel is changing the name so nobody will be able to know if its Celery or Pentium level shite in that Walmart special.
They became too good after a while.
Take the old Pentium G4560. It has many modern features (like hardware video decoding, hyperthreading, AES, virtualization), and can go almost head to head with an Core i5 of a few generations back:
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i5_4570-vs-intel_pentium_g4560
A more recent G6400 will even surpass one time speed champion i7-4770k:
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i7_4770k-vs-intel_pentium_gold_g6400
And at a very reasonable sub-$50 price.
Hence, Intel has a conundrum. Unless you are in the top-of-the-line gaming, or workstation market, there is almost no need to go for anything else than a Pentium. Their low end models are actually very good.
Isn’t it a generic word? How about Ford making a brand called “Car”? Let’s see Samsung offering a series called “Phone”? Dell producing a line called “Computer”?
Apple’s iPhone ? In France it is forbidden to brand a product using a “generic” name. “Windows” would never have existed there in French wording.
Well, that’s also a problem case, but not as bad as using single generic words.
The gist of the problem here is that, when I say “iphone”, you’ll have a rough picture of what I’m talking about. At the very least, you’ll know that it is produced by Apple. When I say “phone”, you’ll just be puzzled, wondering “which phone?”
Doing away with marketing would be a good way to save the planet, not to mention the humankind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ka
So is office, yet Microsoft sells Office which can contains the Word, Excel, Publisher, Access programs.
EDIT: I have been told “contains” alone implies every version of Microsoft Office (TM) includes all of those programs, which is not the case.
We solved this problem earlier today:
Intel
Filing the trademark now.
… Man this new branding is lazy.
Pentium -> “Intel Processor”
Thunderbolt -> “Intel Data Wire Thinggy”
Xeon -> “Intel Processor for Rack Computer Machines”
Intel VT -> “Intel Computer Inception”