Say bye to the ‘i’ — Intel details new Core, Core Ultra chip branding

As rumours indicated, Intel will kill its long-standing ‘Core i3/5/7’ branding in favour of new ‘Intel,’ ‘Intel Core,’ and ‘Intel Core Ultra’ names. It also won’t be highlighting which generation a chip is from anymore — in other words, no more ’13th Gen Core i5.’

Intel’s branding experts told The Verge that the change was about avoiding losing the ‘Intel’ name. With the old naming scheme, people often shortened the name to ‘Core i5’ or even just ‘i5’ when talking about the company’s chips. Instead, Intel thinks that by dropping the ‘i’ part of the name, it’ll make it more difficult for people to shorten chip names that way.

Coupled with the upcoming Meteor Lake chips, which the company says will be a big shift for its processors, it seemed like a great opportunity to make the change. However, it remains to be seen how the new branding plays out in practice (and it’s also not clear to what degree the tanking PC market impacted this decision).

While the names of the chips will change, Intel says it will keep the full alphanumeric identifiers it has used to differentiate chips across performance tiers and generations. That should help enthusiasts keep on top of which chip is which. Intel shared some fake example chip names with The Verge to illustrate how the new branding will work:

• Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 1090H
• Intel Core Ultra 7 processor 1070K
• Intel Core 5 processor 1050U

In the above examples, the ‘H,’ ‘K’ and ‘U’ should keep their existing meaning, identifying the first chip as a flagship laptop CPU with powerful on-board graphics, the second as a high-end desktop chip with overclocking capabilities, and the third as a mid-range, low-power laptop chip.

Intel also told The Verge it thinks dropping the generational indicators (like ’13th Gen’) from the branding will be beneficial, at least for retailers. The company acknowledges that it’s retail partners have to sell “a lot of older products,” and the 13th Gen stamp can help indicate what’s new, but also what’s old. By dropping that, the branding becomes a “little bit more flexible.”

For consumers, it will likely just end up being more confusing or even misleading if it’s not immediately clear which chips are new and which are old. Customers should still be able to tell from the alphanumeric identifier, though not everyone will know to look for that.

Finally, Intel has already implemented some of this branding shift. For example, the company dropped its Pentium and Celeron branding in 2022 in favour of ‘Intel Processor.’ But for the Core and Core Ultra naming, we’ll need to wait for the Meteor Lake drop later this year.

Header image credit: Intel

Source: The Verge