Intel is officially killing the “i” in Core i7 — because it goes ultra

The rumors were true: Intel is officially killing the “i” in “Core i9,” “Core i7,” “Core i5,” and “Core i3” — and it won’t refer to its next series of processors as broadly “14th Gen,” or so.

The chipmaker now plans to sell three tiers of consumer chips: Intel, Intel Core and Intel Core Ultra.

Why? Intel branding experts tell me the most important word was missing “Intel”, and fundamentally different The upcoming Meteor Lake chips in the second half of 2023 provided an opportunity to change things.

“When we looked at how the tech press, our retailers, our OEMs, our partners talked about it, it was interesting to see how we got short-changed to a letter and a number,” Christopher Hirsch, Intel’s Product Director of Branding, Tells ledge,

The company says its research found that it was “Core,” not “i5” or “i7,” that triggered the association with Intel. “Does the ‘I’ with the iPhone and iPod represent Apple? Was it just an unknown? It was one of the costs of people not knowing they were our products,” Hirsch says.

But after dropping the “i” you can’t shorten the name that easily. “People won’t walk in saying ‘I bought a seven.'”

You would say Core 7, probably. Or the Ultra 7, since the company is also taking the opportunity to differentiate its flagship parts from the mainstream in the same way the BMW M5 differentiates itself from the BMW 5 Series, suggests Intel brand strategist Tim Thraves.

It’s not a perfect analogy because ultra doesn’t necessarily stand for speed or style or luxury, at least where Intel is concerned. (For Apple, which already has two generations of Ultra processors and an Ultra Watch on the market, it’s clearly all about performance.)

Hirsch and Thraves can’t say much but hint that Intel’s Ultra products will have “large feature sets” integrated into “arch-level graphics processors that you won’t see on any product in the mainstream Core space,” AI capabilities (such as AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm), and “absolute best performance.”

Where, before, the question might have been “Am I an i7 guy, am I an i9 guy,” it’s now “Are you an Ultra buyer, or are you a Core buyer,” Hirsch says. “Only then are you going down the tearing path” of the 3, 5, 7, and 9, he says — though you won’t get the Ultra 3 or Core 9, probably because they’ll send mixed messages.

Importantly for enthusiasts like me, you’ll still be able to see a chip’s full alphanumeric identifier and identify its capabilities and generation just as we’ve been doing for many years. Hirsch promised, “It will always be in the model number for those who need to find it.”

Here are some fake chip naming examples that Intel provided me, so you can see that things aren’t changing too much:

• Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 1090H
• Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 1070K
• Intel Core 5 Processor 1050U

If my decoder ring holds up, those gimmicky names are 1) a flagship laptop processor with powerful onboard graphics, 2) a powerful desktop processor unlocked for enthusiasts to overclock, and 3) a midrange low -Voltage laptop chip, just like they would in previous generations. “For people who look for HX, K…, we will continue to drive products for those segments,” says Thraves.

There is one potential point of confusion that occurs to me – when retailers don’t clearly differentiate between “13th generation” and “14th generation”, what’s to stop someone from mistakenly purchasing last years core instead of latest? But Intel seems to think this is a feature rather than a bug. “Our customers, the OEMs, they have to sell a lot of older products… Shouting ’13th generation’ highlights what’s new, but it also screams what’s old. We want to make it a little more flexible,” Thraves says.

Still, chip numbers should be visible on store shelves if you want to look them up.

While the company is primarily talking about the Core and Core Ultra today, it already spun off the Pentium and Celeron value brands last year. Lower-end processors are now simply called Intel processors, such as This Intel processor N200,

I’m sorry not asking about how the PC market is tanking and whether the rebranding might have anything to do with it. I Did Ask whether it’s really worthwhile to exclude names like “i5” and “i7” and they didn’t get a compelling answer, but Hirsch and Thraves made it clear that their company believes the benefits are worth it.