Intel Names Upcoming Chips

Phooey42 writes "USA Today is reporting that Intel has finally announced names for their new set of desktop and notebook processor lines, previously dubbed Conroe and Merom. The new chips for both the desktop and laptop lines will be dubbed "Core 2 Duo", whereas their new "premium processor" for high end desktop users will be called the "Core 2 Extreme". Knowing Intel, who would have ever thought that the successor to the Core Duo would be the Core 2 Duo!?"

Latest Trend in Branding

[IntlHarvester]

Many companies are doing similar -- the goal is to emphasize the company brand name over the individual product names.

For example, Cadillac replaced the Seville and Deville with anonymous letters like STS and DTS. This puts more brand id on "Cadillac" part. And Apple is moving to a generic Mac* naming scheme to emphisize the "Apple" and "Mac" parts over the individual model names.

Intel had the problem that "Pentium" had such high brand recognition that it was difficult to move away from it, and after a while having products like "Pentium D" got very silly & confusing. They could create a new product brand like "Stupendium", but then they're starting at zero and they would just create the same problem again in the future. Instead they put that money behind "Intel" by picking a rather generic product names.

Confuse the consumer - brilliant!

[amichalo]

This is just brilliant marketing for Intel - instead of using logically progressive numbers (286, 386, 486) they are activly confusing the consumer base (Core Solo -> Core Duo -> Core 2 Duo -> Core 2 Extreme) with subjective an illogical naming conventions.

This means that consumers will have to rely more heavily on Best Buy and Dell to "guide" them right where Intel wants them - buying a computer with too much horsepower for what they want to do - send email and surf the web - but just enough so that when Vista arrives, it is "too slow" and an upgrade will be in order in a few years.

Re:Come on...

[Aspirator]

When Intel first decided to abandon conventional chip numbering,
8086 . 80186 . 80286 . 80386 . 80486 and then magically 'Pentium',
based on the Latin for 5, I was convinced that there next one
would be 'Sexium', based on the Latin for 6.

And that really would have had 'Sex' appeal.

Re:What's inside Intel these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this insightful?

The "Core 2" will likely take the performance crown in the laptop and desktop space for late 2006 / early 2007, if not longer. Also it will likely beat AMD at performance per watt (even more so then in raw performance). I think you are out of touch with what Intel is doing.

It could have been worse

[MigLar2000]

At least they didn't call it "Wii"

Making good processors?

[Sycraft-fu]

At this point, the Core series are untouched in the laptop market when it comes to performance/power. They are extremely fast, up there with many desktop chips, yet very low power. That was one of the driving factors of Apple going Intel, the Core chips are impossible to beat at this point for efficient laptops.

Looks like it's going to swing back around on the desktop too. The Conroe, Intel's next gen desktop chip looks like it's a powerhouse. It's apparantly faster than what's out currently (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2713&p=1) and, more importantly, is much more power efficient.

To me, looks like Intel is doing just fine. I know it's popular to hate on Intel, but really, their products are not bad. AMD does not have some amazing, crushing superority. Their products are a little faster right now. Ok, great, looks liek Intel's products will be a little faster here soon, and I expect AMD to hit back with something not long after that.