Agreed. I was checking this out a week back (and perhaps should have gotten first dibs on a story at Slashdot).
Although I'm a bit of a techie but I haven't looked at processors in a while. So I visited the intel website and I found it impossible to penetrate the permutations of the set
{Pentium, D, Dual, Core, HT, Extreme}. They mean nothing to me except, perhaps, sound cool.
So I figred that they MUST have some kind of comparison chart so that I can make some sense of this. Really had to dig for it, but I found
thisSo, er
.. that still doesn't help me. I want to know how fast / powerful / capable a processor is. Who cares whether it has HT or if it's Exxxtreeeme!
Look at the fine print at the bottom of any product comparison page - "Intel processor numbers are not a measure of performance. Processor numbers differentiate features within each processor family, not across different processor families. See
http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/ for details."
Go ahead and click it. You will find :
"The processor number is not a measurement of performance, nor is it the only factor to consider when selecting a processor.
The digits themselves have no inherent meaning, particularly when looking across processor families. For instance, 840 is not "better" than 640 simply because 8 is greater than 6.
Furthermore, linear increments between processor numbers may not indicate linear feature advancements. For example, the differences in processor features between an Intel® Pentium® M processor 760 and an Intel® Pentium® M processor 765 will not be the same as between an Intel® Pentium® M processor 765 and an Intel® Pentium® M processor 770, even though both pairs of processors are separated by an increment of five digits.
Processor numbers do not represent specific system configurations and do not replace system-level benchmarks."
WTF?!
Yes, perhaps it is a good idea to start naming processors after "features" because focus has started shifting towards better design of processors (rather than just brute force speed). But then again, I would like some solid benchmark to compare all these processors.
I say they should just measure in FLOPS and leave it be. What they have now is just sad.
