Relative Speed CPU Naming

Staten Island, NY Posted: 10/31/2015 1:00:00 AM

Why is it so hard to understand CPU names?

In the early days of computing, it was pretty easy to tell the difference between computer speeds, based on the numbering system used on the CPU. For computers with an Intel CPU, you only needed two things, the CPU series, and it's clock speed to know how fast your performance would be, relative to other CPUs.

Other than some oddball numbering issues in Intel's early days, it was common knowledge that an Intel 80386 family was faster than an 80286, but not as fast as the 80486. Within each family you knew a 32 MHz CPU was twice as fast as the 16 MHz version.

To further simplify things, even competing companies used the same numbers as Intel for comparable chips. That's when things started to change. When Intel released their successor to the 486 CPU, they decided to name it "Pentium", rather than 586, because they realized they couldn't Trademark a number. Up to that point, you knew each new generation would have a higher number, and it would be faster than the previous generation. Then, for some strange reason, they started releasing newer generations of CPUs like the Celeron that weren't necessarily faster than the previous generation.

Ever since then, they've used a series of names and numbers that make it virtually impossible to tell them apart. Thankfully, they decided to name some of their recent CPUs with numbers, i3, i5, and i7 so that you could understand the difference between low end, midrange and high end models.

Unfortunately, after the success of the i3, i5 and i7 lines, they're still hard to tell apart, because they not only brought back older generation names like Pentium and Celeron, but they added seemingly random suffixes that have no apparent meaning. For example on suffix could mean your i5 has 2 Cores, while another suffix could mean it has 4 cores.

So if you want to know if brand X with an i5 better than another model with a Pentium... you won't know unless you thoroughly researched each CPU model.

Wouldn't it be easier to name each successive version with a number, then have two suffixes such as -2 or -4 for the number of cores, followed by the clock rate?

While there are still a lot of other potential differences between each CPU, it would be much better if they at least made some effort to make the part numbers easier to tell apart. Simply stated, newer, faster CPUs should have higher numbers then previous or slower CPUs.

Personally, I think it's wrong for Intel to use the same CPU name such as i5 for a CPU that comes with either 2 or 4 cores. That's a pretty big difference, so if they insist on using the same name, they should at least put the number of cores as a suffix.

For the i3, i5, and i7, why not make the odd numbers represent dual core, and even numbers represent the quad core versions?

So the i4 would be a quad core i3, the i6 would be a quad core i5 and the i8 would be a quad core i7.

If they really want to make it easier, it would be great if they put a standardized score on the chip, such as Microsoft's CPU rating (which you can see from the System Information link in the menu), or a standardized benchmark such as GeekBench.

Joe Crescenzi, Founder

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Relative Speed CPU Naming

Why is it so hard to understand CPU names?

Wouldn't it be easier to name each successive version with a number, then have two suffixes such as -2 or -4 for the number of cores, followed by the clock rate?

For the i3, i5, and i7, why not make the odd numbers represent dual core, and even numbers represent the quad core versions?

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