Over the last couple of days there has been assorted discussion about how Intel have chosen to abandon the 10 year old Pentium brand name for its mainstream processors. Is this a good thing? A nutso move by a company willing to try anything to maintain its market position now it is under threat from rival AMD?
Actually, I think it makes sense. Now that the megahertz myth has been busted wide open and even Intel have stopped cranking their clock speeds ever higher (perhaps in fear of an inevitable China Syndrome when they hit ~6GHz), everyone wants to market their processors without relying on clock speed. A couple of years ago, Intel introduced a new naming scheme for its processors, playing down the clock speed, but still people ask for a 3GHz Pentium, or whatever. So here we are, moving away from the word Pentium and hopefully getting the punters used to the fact that not all chips need to be sold by how many mega-, or nowadays, gigahertz it clocks at.
Of course, supposedly one of the main reasons that Intel started using the name Pentium was so that they could trademark the name — in the olden days their competitors would build compatible chips with the same numbering scheme because numbers cannot be trademarked. Now the product name is back to a bunch of numbers, we have gone full circle...
1 comment:
I think they may have dropped Pentium because people were asking for Pentium chips instead of Intel chips.
So now they have a trademark on "Intel Core" and are selling "Intel Core Duo" and "Intel Core Solo".
Very annoying given dual core, multi-core and such terms are pretty much standard language in the CPU world these days.
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