We Call Bullchip! Intel Wrong to Rebrand Core M as Core i

[Edward78]

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Does a golf cart get any faster if you call it a car? In the processor world, we're about to find out. This week, Intel announced its new 7th generation, “Kaby Lake” laptop processors, and the low-power, mediocre-performing m5 and m7 series chips are officially gone. Sort of.

 

[Martini1991]

Intel are free to call new chips whatever they like.

Besides, i5 didn't mean the same thing to everyone already, as they come in dual and quad cores, hell I'm sure there's even some dual core i7's.

 

[Doogles]

Intel are free to call new chips whatever they like.

Besides, i5 didn't mean the same thing to everyone already, as they come in dual and quad cores, hell I'm sure there's even some dual core i7's.

The old i7 9xx series are 2 cores iirc although that's a little behind my time.

 

[Reality|Bites]

No they weren't

 

[Martini1991]

The old i7 9xx series are 2 cores iirc although that's a little behind my time.

The 9XX were quad cores and even introduced octo cores with gulftown.

 

[Reality|Bites]

and before your time

 

[h4rm0ny]

Intel have done this because the OEMs requested it. And the OEMs requested it because being able to slip in 4.5W parts under the same naming as more powerful parts helps them shift units. This is the reason for all this.

Takes me back to when the hard drive sellers cottoned on to the fact that they could introduce SI versions of storage capacity (something pretty much unused by the entire engineering world) and caused a decade of confusion by trying to redefine established terms under the pretence that customers were impacted by base 2 numbering. All so they could sell a smaller device for more.

Beware when marketing people meddle in the affairs of engineers. Obfuscation and misunderstandings are the inevitable consequence.

 

[Edward78]

Intel are free to call new chips whatever they like.

Besides, i5 didn't mean the same thing to everyone already, as they come in dual and quad cores, hell I'm sure there's even some dual core i7's.

Not saying they aren't free to rebrand them. just odd calling mCPUs i5/i7 instead of m5/m7...

 

[kaku]

Purely to mislead consumers.

Even people in my office don't necessarily see the difference between low-power/laptop and desktop chips - "an i7 is an i7".

 

[VKleita]

Purely to mislead consumers.

Even people in my office don't necessarily see the difference between low-power/laptop and desktop chips - "an i7 is an i7".

Oh Don't get me started.

Arguing with someone the other week who has a first generation Mobile I7 in his laptop.

He still to this day claims his old laptop is faster than my gaming rig despite the actual graphs to prove it.....
"An I7 always beats an I5, no matter how fast it is, that's what the sales person told me"

As was said above, sometimes Sales people want to muddy the water on purpose...

 

[Confused Stu]

I find the desktop setup so easy to understand:
2 cores without hyperthreading and lower - Pentium/Celeron
2 cores + HT = i3
4 cores - HT = i5
4+ cores + HT = i7

When it comes to mobile/laptop, I get completely lost as all i7 seems to mean is "with hyperthreading" as there's a mix of 2 and 4 cores all listed as i7s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors#Mobile_processors

I understand Intel want to have a simple i3 > i5 > i7 setup to make it easy to compare machines, but it doesn't help when you're trying to compare between generations or even between laptop and desktop. At least call the laptop CPUs i3m/i5m/i7m or similar to differentiate them.

I recently had the same discussion as VKleita when a colleague was after advice on the cheapest low-end gaming PC he could build, and was adamant that he needed an i7 as his 5 year old laptop was an i5 (first gen) and it wasn't fast enough for him, so he wouldn't be persuaded that a modern desktop i3 or even i5 would be any faster. I even tried car analogies that a 20 year old GTi or "2 litre" would be slower than a modern car called a GTi, or with a 2 litre engine, but he was sure that because it's called an i5, it runs at the same speed as any other chip called an i5. In the end, I gave up showing him facts and benchmarks, and simply wished him luck but I couldn't help him with advice if he wasn't going to listen to it.

 

[Doogles]

and before your time

Yeah I wasn't even interested in PC's until 2012 that is when I started to learn. Laugh all you want at least I might get to see HL3

 

[TALON1973]

Yeah I wasn't even interested in PC's until 2012 that is when I started to learn. Laugh all you want at least I might get to see HL3

That made me chuckle But his comeback must be at least got to be able to play on a sitdown cabinet playing space invaders ( well that's mine as a 42 year old lol ) .

 

[Orangey]

When I was a kid we had a holiday home, there was a hotel nearby that had a bar and fancy dinner hall (so we spent a lot of time there) and arcade(where I spent all my time). The arcade had a sitdown Invaders & Kong, Jedi, loads more. Found out it was bulldozed a few years ago. Wish I had got to go back one last time, maybe even save the cabinets.