Do marketing people in tech have any idea how weird they sound when they write or say these things? Can they not sound like an authentic human being?

“Intel is committed to driving innovation to benefit users, and our entry-level processor families have been crucial for raising the PC standard across all price points,” Josh Newman, VP and interim general manager of Mobile Client Platforms at Intel, said in a canned statement.

And my absolute favorite:

“This update streamlines brand offerings across PC segments to enable and enhance Intel customer communication on each product’s value proposition, while simplifying the purchasing experience for customers,” the chipmaker explained.

The word "explained" is doing a lot of work there...

You would think if you wanted to 'streamline' communication of the product's value across the brand you would move the Celeron/Pentium offering to use the Core naming schema, even though they are not the same architecture. Call it 'i1' or something, your average person doesn't give a damn about the architecture inside, they'll now know a i1 is less than an i3 in performance. Even I don't really care about the architecture inside. Does it work? Does it not become a space heater? Can it run the applications I need? Great, I don't care if the electron inside turns right instead of left when it comes out of a gate.

"The word "explained" is doing a lot of work there..."

Unfortunately, it is still failing badly !!!

Translation for Marketing Droids:

This customer communication update is non-optimally proformant as a information transfer exercise.

:)

... sadly, "leveraging" and "facilitating" are missing. Essential for the perfect salad!

Can't wait for the Microsoft X-Box X Series XPro Xtreme with the Intel Processsor X, specifically made for the X-Box X Series XPro Xtreme.

Thank-you for your X-Planation

B-Ark leaving in 20 minutes.

If they can't come up with a better choice of name that that. It's right up there with Ford's Ka. It makes OS/2 seem imaginative.

For ages they've benefitted by people not making any sort of distinction, and therefore assuming Intel. For instance, since the late '80s, any book or course teaching assembly language never specified the architecture, because OF COURSE it was x86.

An example is that "x64" isn't a real thing - the "x" is supposed to mean it's a placeholder, and there are no 80164 / 80264 / 80364 / 80464, et cetera, processors. But if Microsoft / Intel can make most people who see "64 bit" in relation to a processor assume it's referring to amd64 / x86_64, then that'll make them happy.

Intel knows ARM is a serious, real threat, so if they can co-opt the word "processor", they will. They want people to be confused when they hear "ARM processor".

I recall (hopefully right) Intel went with Pentium, Celeron etc in the early days because they could not trademark 586, 686 etc. Seems strange they would pick such a generic name for their processors.

Hmm. Wouldn't it be funny if they had to do a reverse ferret on this re-branding because it turned out you couldn't trademark the word "processor" in the context of processors. It might even be worth AMD's and ARM's time to challenge this in court.

Erm, Windows, anyone?

There were likely no other software products called "Windows" at the time, so they could trademark it in that context. Apple Computer and Apple Corps could coexist as one was computers and the other was music - although at the time of the resolution, Steve Jobs' company was to keep out of the music sphere.

MS have fallen foul of trademarks themselves - ever wondered why Win 8's Metro UI was renamed Modern UI? Sometimes, the little guy wins (especially when it's European courts, the small guy is a European company and the big guy is a US company already in hot water with European courts).

You can trademark a word for purposes it wasn't used for before. Windows brand operating system isn't confusing. Windows brand windows would be. Thus, if you want to trademark Processor as the name for your new restaurant, you'll likely be able to do it. Trademarking that for your processor will likely be denied. Snap (the Snapchat people) ran into this a while ago when trying to trademark "Spectacles" for a pair of glasses.

Intel might not even try that, given they're avoiding anything memorable here. They still have a trademark on Intel, so they're probably trying to hide the labels they think users associate with poor performance. Of course, I think if you ask a nontechnical person, they've probably never heard of either existing brand name and couldn't tell you where they are in the product line.

The funny thing about this branding push is that modern Celerons can be pretty good. As long as you don't get a 2016 one by mistake or skimp on the RAM, they're more than capable for many tasks.

BRB, trademarking Windows branded doors

They're trying what Apple did - they called their phone in iPhone, etc. And marketing drones believe whatever Apple do is the best. So a good name for a processor is Processor - marketing drones are already living in Idiocracy and believe everybody else is as dumb as them. Everything need to be simplified - more nuanced thinking should be forbidden. Why sat "better" when you can say "plusgood"?

All of their more recent naming has been very simple like Apple Watch, Apple Silicon, Apple TV+, etc. but that's because they view the 'Apple' brand as being so strong they don't need anything else. If they were naming iPhone today it would undoubtedly be called Apple Phone.

iPad is the last product that got Apple's old 'i' naming scheme they started in the late 90s with iMac. The Apple branding has the virtue of not having to worry about someone else already owning the name 'iX' when you introduce a new product 'X'.

Other than their "Intel Inside" campaign from long ago, Intel has always created brands around their CPUs, first Pentium then Core, along with Xeon on the server side. Unless Intel makes the same change to the rest of their line I have to agree with the article that they are probably doing this because public perception of the Pentium name probably is associated with outdated technology in the minds of consumers over 30, and with low end crap in the minds of the younger ones.

I think Apple started ditching the i prefix when they couldn't call Apple TV "ITV". They'd been buying trademarks from people for a while (even doing that deal with Cisco so they could both use iOS). Admittedly, they didn't bother keeping the iBook brand around earlier than that, so maybe someone figured out that it no longer meant much.

Title says it all.

Celeron range has seperated hardware for Graphics Driver, specifically off-loading 4K video processing from CPU.

Maybe should have been renamed Celeron2-4K, Pentium4-4K to reflect ability to process streaming.

Does anyone buy their junk anymore?

Darn it! There goes my bet that it'd be called the Intel Sexolicious Bootytron.

"Darn it! There goes my bet that it'd be called the Intel Sexolicious Bootytron."

That does sound like a great EDM band name.

They could call them Duck Soup, as even today you tell someone you have an i7, it all sounds great, but when you get into which generation out of the 12 or so, which each have both a generation code name, something like Ivy League, Broadmoor and Skyleak, and then down to their codes - where a 9800 is older than a 7700, and I would not be surprised to find an i6 5318008 floating around in their naming department… so already Intel’s naming is incomprehensible (just like graphics cards…), may as well call them Intel Processor and just give some meaningful name to the range denoting their power.

I would suggest:

- “Cold Treacle” for their low end netbooks,

- “Slow” for the i3,

- “Downhill with a tailwind” for i5,

- “Acceptable” for the i7,

- “Eyewateringly expensive” for the i9.

Add the “Pro” suffix for the Xeon range, and year version them all, so an Intel Processor Cold Treacle 2022 will be slower than the “Eyewateringly Expensive 2022”, but the Slow Pro 2028 may actually be better then the Acceptable 2023.

Clear, simple, to the point.

/rant.

Deliberately incomprehensible

As they haven't been able to keep up with demand for high end parts, they are selling down generation crap with similar names/numbers to confuse buyers and attempt to move the backstock off the shelves. Also helps to disguise the fact that many of the newer parts are both more expensive and worse than their predecessors.

On the upside, AMD has been getting in on the game, and Apple is hardly transparent about the changes to it's M1 and M2 lines over time.

And as honest benchmarks are also unobtainium, we are largely at the mercy of the spec sheet and guesswork, resulting in people overbuilding and over paying for cpu's that sit idling in the low teens for their entire service life.

Just a thought...