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Intel gives Nehalem its official name: Core i7
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 11th August 2008
Intel has formally announced that its upcoming line of Nehalem processors will use the Core i7 brand name.
What's interesting though is the choice of suffix Intel will use with the new chips; instead of opting for the natural successor to Core 2, Core 3, Intel will oddly use the "i7" suffix.
The statement issued by Intel says that "this is the first of several new identifiers to come as different products launch over the next year," before going onto point out that the brand logo will be available for high performance desktop PCs. This leads us to believe that the mobile and low-end desktop processors may carry a different suffix—or indeed brand—from the high-end products.
The new logo looks quite a bit different to the older Core 2 design, as the white background behind the Intel logo has disappeared. The new Core i7 logo is made up of several different shades of blue, while there will be a separate black logo reserved for Intel's Extreme Edition processors – all wording on both badges will be in white.
Finally, despite the hint that there may be more brands being unveiled for low-end and mobile processor products, Intel confirmed that processors will still continue to be differentiated by model numbers.
The first Core i7-based products expected to be released in the fourth quarter of this year will be Intel's first native quad-core processors and will signal the comeback for Intel Hyper-Threading Technology following its absence from the original Core microarchitecture. This will enable the chips to handle up to eight software threads on the four physical processing cores.
What do you think of Intel's new branding scheme for Nehalem? Share your thoughts in the forums.
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Comments (33)Stats: 0.119 seconds
but i like the performance the most. if the performance preview is as good as they say, that thing can be called Intel HelloKitty for all I care.......
Ahh but a CPU named HelloKitty would also be cooler than i7 !!
However, if it were named Intel Core Turd...
edit: found another, Yonah.
What about all the chips before Pentium though?
80386 and so on...
No wait, Apple probably already reserved that one. :)
Perhaps they should just appeal to the target consumer and call it i7-of-9. :D
You're forgetting everything from 8086 onwards... I've gone through various iterations of what it could mean, and the only one I can come up with (at the moment) is that it's the 7th generation architecture if you fit the Core microarchitecture under the P6 umbrella, as they went 'forwards' with Netburst and then returned back to P6 with refinements for Core.
According to Wikipedia, Netburst was the 7th Generation Microarchitecture.
There really is no logic to this new nomenclature...
i7..... stupid name, just like GTX series graphics card and p35 (where's p25 and p15? )
- 16-bit x86 (8086 -> 80286)
- 386 series
- 486 series
- Pentium 'classic'
- P6/Pentium M/Yonah/Core
- Netburst
There was also a bunch of additional processors released in the 80s and 90s (including the iAPX 432, 80960, 80860, etc) and there was also the Itanic microarchitecture, but none of them are x86 compatible.
Even with this, I don't think I'm right... it just happened to be something I spent my lunchtime trying to understand. And that was as close as I got.
I hope you were having chips while thinking about that. :) The irony alone is delicious.
Does it really matter what it means though? A names a name. Except maybe the Intel Core Toaster.
Sam
From Wikipedia:
The Tillamook are a Native American tribe from Oregon of the Salish linguistic group. The name Tillamook is a Chinook term meaning "people of Nekelim (or Nehalem)" and is also spelt Calamox, Gillamooks and Killamook
I suppose intel wouldn't risk being sued by the remnants of said tribe. Besides, I'd imagine they can't patent the name Nehalem, just as they couldn't patent 80386, 80486 and 80586 - american IP law forbids the patenting of sequences of nunmbers - which is why it was named Pentium.
So seriously, who gives a flying duck?
But seriously... who cares? It could be named Mud on my shoe and I wouldnt care. It would have been interesting to see a more clever name to taunt AMD, but as you can see they dont care much about AMD as a threat anymore. Heh...
It sounds better in french than english
"ee xept" sounds better than "HI seven"
Computer core "core"
Computer core "core duo"
Computer core "core two" (yes it's called two, no int's not a dual core)
Computer core "core two duo"
Computer core "Pentium dual core" (Yes it says core but isn't a core core or a core two core but a pentium M core...twice *sigh*)
I'd be happy if they just name the things something different every generation.
+1
edit: or iPorn