If Intel has something to improve outside of its lithographic architectures and processes, it is undoubtedly the name it gives them. It is totally dizzying and really difficult to follow the number of them over time, while its rival, although not perfect, follows a very simple strategy that everyone can understand if they have to be immersed in this sector. Why does Intel call its architectures like this?
When we do the exercise of thinking about Intel processors and architectures, the termination Lake always comes to mind. But if we zoom out the image we will see that in addition to this there are a series of platforms that receive equally complicated names.
Lakes, bridges, canyons or mountains known as Lake, Bridge, Canyon or Montain complicate the entire naming system, who is to blame for all this complicated gear and marketing strategy? Where is the meaning of these names?
Intel always references North America in its strategy
The answers are with Jeff Tripp, current Senior Strategic Planner at Intel and thanks to him we can understand everything that moves behind the scenes and how impractical it is for us. According to Tripp, Intel always makes references in its names to enclaves within North America , where it seeks to give it a physical meaning that brings us closer to the thoughts of the design team in Oregon, although it also leaves open the possibility that they were funny names, at least for them.
This is partly true, since the history of Intel reveals such incredible code names as Batman or Thor, although others from some American cities have also been included, all always within their country of origin. The curious thing about this is that although there is that common denominator that represents the US as a pillar, the country’s geography and cartography has been used at different times, with names of rivers in between or even mountains.
Tripp states that Intel has currently switched to a more thematic approach to choose future names, but there is no real reason that determines the nomenclature of each architecture, since it is an open process where there are a number of people participating in said appointment, being an exercise where anything goes.
Match the internal “naming” with the final name of the product
Apparently, formerly Intel had several different names for the same product, one internal and one external for its users. This generated too much confusion among engineers, advertisers and agents, as well as for their OEM customers, therefore, now an architecture, platform or type of product is called in one way, for everyone the same.
Tripp assures that for some years and for the future, the different products will be focused on different geographical areas of the country, since there are certain problems with namings and this leads to legal disputes in many cases.
Coffee Lake, for example, was named at a meeting in the early morning, where the chief planner admitted urgently needing coffee, which was funny and ended up calling two generations of processors that simple.
The main problem is not solved, why are they so complicated?
To find the answer to this, you have to talk to a former Intel employee such as Francois Piednoel, author of names like SkullTrail, Extreme Edition, Sandy Bridge or Skylake among others. Piednoel assures that Intel is not going to say the exact and real reasons why it names its CPUs that way.
His goal, he says, is for Intel and its employees to understand names internally, while it doesn’t matter if people don’t keep up and don’t understand them at all. This is done for security, since Piednoel affirms that if there were leaks no one would know how to fit a new architecture with a name and therefore there can only be speculation about it.
A second factor is surprise. If there has not been a leak on naming, Intel can surprise the world with it, if the presentation is predictable at this point it would be much less interesting. This causes a rather interesting fact, and that is that if no one knows the name of the processor or the architecture or can not locate it as such, Intel can supply engineering samples with lower performance and pass them off as something experimental or even old, obtaining feedback on sections such as stability, temperatures etc …
And they can even go to fairs and show it ensuring that the platform is faster, but leaving all the other unknowns in the air. In addition, Intel no longer allows original names such as those mentioned above, for example, Skulltrail (skull) which arrived after the beating of AMD to Intel with the X64, so when leaving the Core 2 Duo it made sense to launch a message of answer with said platform.
Now the company is focused on maintaining a calm and calm brand image that helps them sell their products to other companies.
The problem of the importance of code names
The biggest problem Intel faces with their names is that they do not impress, they are not capable of impacting the user and this is something that AMD logically suffers from. Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Comet Lake and so on until Intel decides to end the series, this is something that is perceived from the user as an upgrade, an incremental change that, although not really so, the ordinary user You are not impacted by a new product, but rather think about an update of the previous one.
Piednoel assures that this would not happen if it returned to the traditional nomenclature type Katmai, Willamette, Prescott … And it is that if to the name of the architecture we add the naming of each processor … The problems increase. Intel Core iX XXXX, is something that the company could change by segmenting the names according to the task they are intended for , so it would be much simpler to understand what type of processor we are talking about.
For example, there would be a range for gaming, another for mining, another for editing and so on, but with different and well-focused names. And it is that according to Piednoel, this is the only market in the world where users use the code name more than the brand itself.
Use the example of a car, where he claims to drive a BMW 750 from the 80s, where in a trivial conversation we would not say I drive an E32, something that does happen in the PC industry. This ex-Intel employee assures that as far as naming is concerned, Intel has been preparing something for years, something big and that it will start with the announcement of a new type of product, where perhaps the names will change radically, what will it be?