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Intel Names Upcoming Chips 216

Posted by Hemos from the duo-squared1 dept.
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!?"
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Intel Names Upcoming Chips More

Intel Names Upcoming Chips

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  • Nice to see Intel stepping it up a bit. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kranfer ( 620510 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:33AM (#15285505) Homepage Journal
    I am very happy to see Intel stepping it up in the Processor market again. Hopefully it will provide a nice environment for more competition between AMD and Intel again so another leap forward can be made in the computing world. Also, I hope they come up with a new jingle for this processor... I hate hte Pentium one. Hehe. Evil inside.

  • Suggested name for the next line of processors: (Score:5, Funny)

    by guitaristx ( 791223 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:34AM (#15285514) Journal
    Intel CoreTwin 2 Duo Pair, Mark Two!

  • Ugh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:35AM (#15285519) Homepage
    Intel has recently come up with a series of totally unoriginal and ultimately confusing names for their CPUs.

    For example, the "Core Duo" is a pretty unoriginal name for a dual core processor, and I've seen a lot of people start referring to dual core CPUs as "DuoCore" or other such nonsense.

    Core 2 Duo? Talk about redundant and confusing naming...

    • Re:Ugh! (Score:4, Funny)

      by thefirelane ( 586885 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:43AM (#15285579)
      Core 2 Duo? Talk about redundant and confusing naming...

      Wait until you see its sequel: The Core 2 Duo 2

    • Core 2 Duo? Talk about redundant and confusing naming...

      Whatever do you mean? It should be blindingly apparent that the Core 2 Duo has 4 cores (i.e. - 2xCore Duo = 4 cores), no?

      This is getting as bad as the automakers releasing model year vehicles well earlier than the actual calendar year begins. For example, you've been able to buy the new 2007 GM Denali/Yukon since January of 2006. Not to get off topic, but there should be a law against such lies (e.g. - if you sell a vehicle that was built in CY2006,

      • Re:Ugh! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by misxn ( 901438 )
        He means this...

        A new PowerMac (renamed) that will have:

        Two, Dual Core, Core 2 Duo processors

        That's a mouthful! And too redundant.
      • you've been able to buy the new 2007 GM Denali/Yukon since January of 2006

        That reminds me of a fantastic example I saw a few years ago.

        I can't remember what car this was (or even the specific year), but I think it was a new Cadillac, model year 2004. I saw an ad for this car in a magazine dated December 2002! It was on the shelf in early November. Yikes! That was the most ludicrous example I've ever seen in automotive marketing.

    • Latest Trend in Branding (Score:5, Informative)

      by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:55AM (#15285682) Journal
      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.
      • Maybe Intel should have gone with something like Pentasm or Pentation, so it would be seen a succesor to the Pentiums.

      • Re:Latest Trend in Branding (Score:5, Insightful)

        by God'sDuck ( 837829 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:16PM (#15285860)
        the problem with generic product names here, though, is that they lack a logical increment signifier in a strongly incremental field -- with cars, you have a very simple system: car line, plus model year -- you know Q-Turbo9000 2006 came after the 2005. But tell me now: which is newer/faster? Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955? Intel Pentium 4 670? Intel Pentium M 770? Intel Xeon 3.0? the numbers run differently in every line, with no discernable (to the consumer) relation.
        • Actually I don't see what Intel is doing as being that different from cars. You have "Core 1", "Core 2" for model year/generation, and after that, anything goes. It's not like most car models/sub-models can be decoded by name alone either.
        • You don't want everyone who the latest/fastest chip to feel like they're not getting the absolute "best" available either. Especially when they're probably spending a lot of money on a computer. This is probably why the naming is so odd.
        • The confusion in Intel's product names reflected the confusion inside the company, I think. At the time the various crazy "Extreme Edition", "Xeon", and "Pentium M" names came out, Intel had three (or four? I forget) separate engineering teams, working on entirely different implementations of the Pentium architecture.

          It seems like the "NetBurst" design is well and truly dead now. The laptop chips are making their way into the desktop arena, and therefore it makes sense for the company to rationalize the nam
    • The name makes sense... as long as you don't overanalyse it.

      It's a second-gen "Core"-brand chip, with two cores. (2 being the generation, "Duo" or "Solo" being the number of cores in it.)

      What were they supposed to do? Come up with a whole new brand instead of adding a "2"? (Though, since the Core brand just debuted this year, I think it may have been wiser to name it the "Core Duo Plus" or something.)

      Personally, I think "Core" is a good name for a chip. It strongly implies the role of the product. Better th
    • Intel has recently come up with a series of totally unoriginal and ultimately confusing names for their CPUs.

      Yeah, AMD is much more clear with Opteron, Turion, Athlon, and Sempron.

      Oh, and I dare you to pick a good Opteron model. There is only like 500.

  • Two many? (Score:5, Funny)

    by HugePedlar ( 900427 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:35AM (#15285525) Homepage
    Let's extrapolate: How long until we get the Core 2 Duo Duplex Beta II?

  • thank you for calling the Corey Hotline (Score:5, Funny)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:37AM (#15285539) Journal
    Clearly a better sequel to Core Duo would have been The Two Coreys [wikipedia.org].

  • let's start a boycott (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    against anything with the word "extreem" in it. This includes dictionaries that still contain this "word".
    • I have to disagree with your Dictionary statement. Mainly because Extreme, when used properly, is a very needed word.

      For instance, last week I was making up a fake doctors note to miss work. I had to come up with an ailment that sounded 1. Good enough to keep me from work, and 2. Gross enough so my coworkers would not bother to question it.

      I was tempted to put Diarreah, but instead, I pulled out my trusty Websters Dictionary and came up with "Extreme Diarreah" It was so good they gave me the next day off as

  • Who's gonna buy the regular (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tweekster ( 949766 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:38AM (#15285548)
    model when the Extreme version is out.

    You may risk getting insulted at Best Buy: "Look at that loser buying the regular core duo, guess he cant handle the extreme."

    Oh you got served sucker.

  • Just wait for the next chip. (Score:5, Funny)

    by hal2814 ( 725639 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:39AM (#15285552)
    The successor to the "Core 2 Duo" will be the "Core 2 Duo: Championship Edition." Alas, folks will illegally mod the chip to the point that Intel releases its own "Core 2 Duo Turbo Hyper Fighting" modified chip to combat such modifications. Then they'll release "Super Core 2 Duo" but it'll bomb for the most part and it's home version will nearly bankrupt the company.

  • Got to be some subtlety here (Score:5, Funny)

    by dilvish_the_damned ( 167205 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:40AM (#15285559) Journal
    I know there has got to be a number of ways to make fun of these name choices. My problem is everything I come up with is obvious and pedantic
    I am guessing Intel had the same problem.
  • If you're completely soaked in the month-by-month history of a company's products, then something like "Intel Core Duo" means something to you, and "Intel Core 2 Duo" is a delta off of something you already know.

    To Mr. and Mrs. America, standing in front of two computers at Best Buy and trying to figure out whether it's worth paying extra money for an Intel Core 2 Duo instead of an Intel Core Duo... heck, they aren't even going to be sure it's not just a misprint on the label.

    Will there be an Intel Core 2 S

    • Re:What committee thought that one up? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:57AM (#15285701) Journal
      I'm pretty sure the CPU makers quit caring about the general public's level of understanding about their processors a while ago. It used to be pretty simple, really. You had a primary name of a CPU and then a Mhz speed rating. That was apparently too much for many consumers to comprehend - judging by how many folks had no idea how many generations of Pentiums there were. (EG. "Isn't there a Pentium 5 now, or is the Pentium 4 the best one out?")

      But these days, processor sales are geared towards the system builders and enthusiasts. Basically, it's up to Dell or HP or your local "mom and pop" system builder to choose an appropriate CPU for a given machine, and then to sell it on its merits to an end-user.

      Really, with all the obfuscation of the true speeds of CPUs lately, not to mention all the variants with different numbers of pins on a socket, different amounts of internal cache, etc. - it seems like they're trying hard to ensure the "average user" *can't* understand exactly where the CPU they own benchmarks relative to the others.
      • Yes, I think you're right on. It used to be that CPUs followed a simple progression, faster ones came out and the slower ones got cheaper. Then there was a couple minor varations (SX chips). Then the whole Celeron thing started and new chips started appearing on the bottom of the line up. Now it's more of a spread than a progression.

        I have an old PC -- Compaq Deskpro XL 5133. Just by the name you can tell exactly what's in it. You couldn't do the same thing with a 3Ghz machine -- Intel has built dozens of d
      • The obfuscation is deliberate, to make it harder for people to realize whether or not their getting a good deal. They give up in frustration and just buy the extreme edition because they figure it must be better, so they pay more money for something they don't need, which suits Intel just fine. They're not the only company doing this, just ask anyone who has bought a digital camera lately.
  • Conroe and Merom???

    Looks like a collision between "Monroe [xnumber.com]" (not this one [marilynmonroe.com]) and "Cerom [cerom.fr]"...

  • I read in a magazine (Score:5, Funny)

    by knn03 ( 967441 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:50AM (#15285634)
    I read in a science magazine that these names are 50% unoriginal and 50% lame.

  • Death Star (Score:3, Funny)

    by Council ( 514577 ) <rmunroe@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:51AM (#15285643) Homepage
    "The project has been using the code-name 'Death Star', but we felt that 'Laser 2 Station' would better strike fear into the Rebellion."

  • Hey, CmdrT, get an updated Intel logo, will ya? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Glasswire ( 302197 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:54AM (#15285675) Homepage
    The one you've got there is over 5 months old. Try this [intel.com] one.

  • stupid ass names... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DoctorDyna ( 828525 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @11:56AM (#15285694)
    Why don't they name the chips what they really are rather than rely on names that are buttered for easy sliding down the throat of joe-bob gamer-consumer-whore?

    Assholes, just name the thing "2 cores @ 3.8 ghz with 2 MB Cache 800 FSB."

    That always pissed me off about AMD too. processors with the same clock speed but varying amounts of cache warranted a different "fake speed name". Fuck that, I hate having to read a spec chart to figure out exactly whats in a god damn cpu.

    • Assholes, just name the thing "2 cores @ 3.8 ghz with 2 MB Cache 800 FSB."

      But then you get to explain to your mom what a core is, what a gigahertz is, what a megabyte is, what a cache is, and what a front side bus is. Have fun.

    • They can't trademark "2 cores @ 3.8 ghz with 2 MB Cache 800 FSB."
    • I hate having to read a spec chart to figure out exactly whats in a god damn cpu.

      So by your logic I didn't buy a Honda Odyssey ... I bought a Honda Minivan, 7 passenger, power sliding doors, V6, AM/FM/CD, power seats, hideaway rear seat, AC, automatic, TCS, ABS, side airbags, ....

      Yeah, that'll work.

      CPUs are way too complicated to ever fully identify them with their name. Get use to reading the specs, it's only going to get worse.

      I for one actually really like the AMD approach. I periodically che
      • A "standard" way of measuring CPU speed would make CPUs that are exelent at running the standard benchmark. See what happen with video cards, that have a few fairly standards to measure their speeds you got video drivers that cheat while running those applications. :-P
        • This is true, which is why the current techniques for benchmarking seem to be better. Reporting the framerate on Quake or Oblivion is pretty hard to cheat on. What I am thinking of is a collection of existing applications - with a composite score assembled from performance on those applications. For example, how long does it take Word 2003 XP to open a very complicated document. How long does it take to DIVX encode a standard movie file. What is the frame rate at such-and-such a resolution for Oblivion? Com
      • I for one actually really like the AMD approach. I periodically check the benchmarks to verify that their numbers correlate at least somewhat with real application-level performance.

        Actually, there's been many cases where AMD has bumped their model number due to some internal change without any appreciable gain in performance.

        AMD model numbers are based on an arbietariy formulas that change from time-to-time, and not any sort of realworld benchmark performance. Then you have the Turion chips which use a *di
    • the speed ratings are measure of how quickly the chip cn do work, bigger cache allows work to be done faster, there is nothing wrong with the labeling system. it's a lot better than having to find out how various models from the same manufacturer stand up against each other at a given clock speed.
  • Well it looks like they will be fixing my biggest complaint. I think Core should have been x86-64 from the beginning (or "ia32e" as Intel calls it). That was my biggest complaint with the processor. The new Core 2 Duos (what a dumb and redundant sounding name) is supposed to be based on Memron, which is supposed to have 64-bit support.

    I can't wait for the new Macs that have these things.

  • Rejected alternat names (Score:5, Funny)

    by Billosaur ( 927319 ) * <wgrotherNO@SPAMoptonline.net> on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:06PM (#15285774) Journal
    • Moe & Curly
    • Heckle & Jeckle
    • Tom & Jerry
    • Captain & Tenille
    • Brad & Angelina
    • Sonny & Cher

  • What's inside Intel these days? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blcamp ( 211756 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:08PM (#15285784) Homepage
    Intel has been dropping the ball lately on performance... it seems like the inmates in Marketing have been running this asylum for some time now. They need to hand it back over to Engineering if they are to stop their decline.

    Especially now that even Marketing is running out of ideas, evidenced by stupid product names and logos. (VIIV? 64? 75? Core 2 Duo... Extreme? Wha...?!)

    Make the product perform better than the competition. Make "Intel Inside" *mean something*.

    Do that, and I'd be willing to bet that everything else (including bad marketing) will take care of itself.

    • Making good processors? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @01:27PM (#15286497)
      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.
    • Intel has been dropping the ball lately on performance... it seems like the inmates in Marketing have been running this asylum for some time now. They need to hand it back over to Engineering if they are to stop their decline.

      The way I see it, is that the marketing guys have been doing a great job of hiding the fact that the engineering guys are dropping the ball.

  • Confuse the consumer - brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:14PM (#15285838)
    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.
    • Yeah, cause we all remember how a 386SX compared to a 386DX was nothing like a 486SX compared to a 486DX and what a 486DX2 was. I doubt anyone could call the reusage of the SX/DX moniker to mean something completely different "logical".
  • Sure would be nice to just have a name that gives a chip's relative performance in terms of a single number, which could then be compared to other chips when making buying decisions.

  • Huh? (Score:2, Funny)

    by j00bar ( 895519 )
    So if I have a server with two of these, it's a dual Core 2 Duo? -j00bar

  • More Name Rejects (Score:3, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:27PM (#15285963)
    Rejected Core 2 Duo Names:

    1) CORE 2: The Meltdown
    2) Dual HardCore Extreme2
    3) Penetrino II
    4) C.H.I.P.S. - Core Hardware Intel Pentium Substitute
    5) The Dual Core Acute Consummate Maximal Intense Ultimate Severe Processor

  • It could have been worse (Score:4, Funny)

    by jmichaelg ( 148257 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:27PM (#15285965) Journal
    They could have named them Duo Core Venti and Duo Core Grande.
  • Great to see Hollywood legend Carolyn Conroe finally honored this way!

    I suppose Intel waited until they had a processor that could produce as much heat as she used to do.
  • They could have named them "Justin", "Britney" and "Christina". :) Oh yeah, that's right I forgot you're not supposed to have a sense of humor on Slashdot. Sorry folks.
  • ..I'd love to understand what Intel is doing to one-up the hypertransport that AMD has been so wildly successful with.
    • Massive caches and using ear plugs while the tech fans roar about it. In addition, things like more flexible load reordering and the general wideness of the architecture might alleviate the latency problem. (And, of course, this time the Intel cores won't synchronize over the FSB, but rather share the complete L2.)
      • Of course, it depends on the kind of work you're doing. Much of my work involves multiple threads dealing with the same data objects, so suppose a shared L2 cache would have a big impact. I'm not sure its going to help the game players as much. Specialty chips for physics and calc combined with ever faster video processing is their goal I guess. At some point, graphics processors will need to manage whole objects in virtual physics environments entirely outside the scope of the processor without ever ev
  • I look forward to Apple and Intel releasing the "Apple Core" chip.

  • The only less original names... (Score:3, Funny)

    by TomRC ( 231027 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @12:52PM (#15286183)
    ...will be whatever AMD comes up with as it tries to imitate Intel's names...

  • Apple introducing desktop Macintoshes with these chips.

  • This makes buying CPUs like buying Sony memory (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday May 08, 2006 @01:01PM (#15286260)
    Let's trying to name our products as confusingly as possible:

    Memory Stick (with MagicGate)
    Memory Stick Pro
    Memory Stick Duo
    Memory Stick Pro Duo

    Darned if I know which one will or will not work in my camera. Looks like they want to do the same thing for motherboards.
    • Memory Stick 2 Pro
      Memory Stick 2 Vista
      Memory Stick 2 Extreme
      Memory Stick Ultimate
      Memory Stick Ultimate Pro
      Memory Stick Ultimate Extreme
      Memory Stick Ultimate Special Edition
      Memory Stick Ultimate Special Ultimate Edition
      Memory Stick Ultimate Special Ultimate Edition Duo
      Memory Stick Ultimate Special Ultimate Edition Trio
      Memory Stick Ultimate Turbo
      Memory Stick Ultimate Turbo II Duo

  • Core 2 Duo - Revenge of the Chip

    Core Duo! Part Deux

    Double Double (In talks with In-N-Out over naming rights)

  • At least they didn't call it "Wii"

  • 80x86 (Score:2)

    by ecloud ( 3022 )
    Well I suppose if they had stuck to that scheme it would have had to come to an end anyway, or gain digits. Or it could have hex digits. :-)

    586 (Pentium)
    686 (PPro & PII)
    786 (PIII)
    886 (P4)
    986 (Core)
    A86 (Core 2)
  • Intel also showed off their upcoming quad core technology, "Tukwila". Engadet blurb. [engadget.com]

    What will they call it upon retail? Core Quado? Core Duo-Duo?

  • Apologies for not making a joke on the name, like every other post so far...

    I'm confused about these new CPUs. I know the Core is based off the Pentium M, and the Core 2 uses a new micro-architecture, also based primarily off the Pentium M, as well as the Pentium III. My question is -- is the Core 2 a direct-line descendent from the Core? Or is the Core 2 the first to use the new micro-architecture, with the Core the last direct-line descendent of the Pentium M?
  • "Knowing Intel, who would have ever thought that the successor to the Core Duo would be the Core 2 Duo!?"

    Well I was saving my jokes about redundancy for the Pentium 5, and was disappointed I wouldn't get to use them when they discarded the brand. But lo and behold, Intel gives me Core 2 Duo!

    So why not just Core 4 instead? Since we're not in the Gigahertz race anymore, how about the naming scheme numbering race? Those lamers at AMD are sooo not with the program that their chips don't even have numbe

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