Monday, May 1st 2023
Intel Confirms "Core i-" Getting Replaced by "Core Ultra" For Upcoming Meteor Lake Processors
Intel has made it official that its upcoming Meteor Lake CPU lineup will proudly sport a new branding scheme - as reported on TPU much earlier today, rumors indicated that Intel would be rolling out "Core Ultra" brand extensions across a range of SKUs. The "i" in some model identifiers such as i3, i5, i7, and i9 are now confirmed to be (in part) replaced with "Ultra" - an Ashes of the Singularity benchmark leak identified a CPU called "Core Ultra 5 1003H" early on last week, and that information soon spread across many online hardware news outlets and communities.
Bernard Fernandes, director of global communications at Intel Corp. today addressed the rumors and leaks via Twitter and confirms that a new branding scheme is incoming: "Yes, we are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks!" He makes sure to not directly mention the "Ultra Core" branding in his tweet, but it is heavily implied that he's referring to the discardation and eventual replacement of Intel's classic "i" labelling system.
Sources:
Bernard Fernandes Tweet, Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark
Bernard Fernandes, director of global communications at Intel Corp. today addressed the rumors and leaks via Twitter and confirms that a new branding scheme is incoming: "Yes, we are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks!" He makes sure to not directly mention the "Ultra Core" branding in his tweet, but it is heavily implied that he's referring to the discardation and eventual replacement of Intel's classic "i" labelling system.
88 Comments on Intel Confirms "Core i-" Getting Replaced by "Core Ultra" For Upcoming Meteor Lake Processors
Marketing guy : Let's use Ultra, High, Medium, Low instead of "i" before number !
Intel : Excellent idea !
Now we only have to wait for "Intel Core High 3 1060x", or "Core Low 7 1150h" to be announced.
I REALLY hate those new names if it wasn't obvious...
I do really want to see a high end intel laptop that can get at least half the battery life of a MBP, currently they're abysmal at like 4-6 hours with casual usage, gaming maybe 1.5 hours, but I'm not going to get my hopes up anytime soon.
Base/Pro/Max/Ultra is easy to understand?!
The four terms have no real connection, you just know that Base is le poor man's POS and everyone else gets to feel like a winner. Also do tell me how Max differentiates from Ultra. So Ultra is beyond Max, so in fact 'Maximum' was a straight up lie? Or you get 110% of phone with Ultra? And if you carry a Base, Max or Ultra, you're definitely an amateur, not a pro? I mean seriously, I'm trying to bring reason to this madness, help me.
So now here comes Intel, where even the lowliest piece of crap i3 is now as 'Ultra' as an i9 monstrosity sucking north of 200W?
I guess thát's easy to understand: you know for damn sure you haven't got a clue what it means, but it sure sounds flashy and everyone can feel special and warm & fuzzy inside.That makes it even more peculiar doesn't it. The numbers are staying.
Go check out Goku powering up to level 1, that ain't fun at all.
Also... Intel i1?!Well the architecture is starting to feel like it's from the nineties, so maybe they went full retro on this one, and SUPER was already taken.That's due to the Core prefix, so you'll still get 20th gen Core whether you want it or not :D
My point was Apple is using that scheme and their M1 Ultra is a pretty killer product. Apple gave "Ultra" a very premium feeling. IMO Intel is adopting that for their SKU naming strategy to muddy the waters for Apple and try to capitalize on Apple's marketing. Kind of like when AMD adopted their "Rating" system that was similar to Intel's MHz ratings back when AMD wasn't competing with Intel on clock frequency, so AMD adopted a naming scheme that shifted consumer's attention. I think Intel is the one doing that now, but with Apple's vastly superior silicon (in some metrics).
Or I could be wrong.
There's absolutely nothing ultra about a Core i3
3/5/7/9 is pretty clear as being about the performance only....
This a 2P + 8E chip. Notice that that are two cores in the SOC, marked as SOC-Cores. These are likely to be the Low Power Efficient (LPE) cores that have been rumoured. So to get 18 cores there are 2 cores on the SOC. That leaves 16. The CPU in the diagram has a 64 EU graphics unit, but the 18 core unit has 192 EUs. This suggests a premium unit, so I think the remaining 16 cores would be configured as 8P + 8E.
The other feature to note is the VPU2.7 - this is Intel's AI Engine. It will face competition from Apple's Neural Engine and AMD's shortly to be introduced Dedicated AI Engine on the 7040 Phoenix processor.