Don Clark | August 12, 2008
INTEL has announced branding plans for a new generation of chip technology, relying on a term the company has already spent heavily on popularising.
Forthcoming chips for desktop computers, based on a design codenamed Nehalem, will use the Core brand carried on some existing Intel products.Initial members of the Nehalem product range will carry the additional designation i7.
Intel's branding plans attract wide attention, partly because it often offers computer makers incentives for using brands associated with its products.
In the past few years, Intel dispensed with the Pentium brand in favour of Core, a term that reflects the proliferation of multiple calculating engines, often called microprocessor cores, on recent products.
Intel chips called Core 2 Duo have two microprocessors, while Core 2 Quad products have four.
Chips based on the Nehalem technology, scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, are initially expected to offer four processor cores and simultaneously handle as many as eight computing instructions, known as threads.
The difficulty of finding new terms to describe such complex increases in features was one motivation to move to a numerical designation with i7.
The company said the term was the first in a series of more general indicators of the relative performance of chips, similar to model numbers on some cars.
"We are looking at everything to simplify our brand structure," Intel spokesman Bill Calder said.
Roger Kay, a market researcher with Endpoint Technologies Associates, said the latest move helped but there was still potential for confusion.
Separately, Intel said this week it planned to introduce four mid-range microprocessors and cut prices on some existing chips.
The new chips operate at up to 3GHz but allow computer enthusiasts to boost speeds using a process called overclocking.