Intel’s revolutionary Meteor Lake processors are coming soon, and to celebrate, Intel plans to change the naming scheme we’ve all been familiar with for over a decade. Why, you ask? Someone in the ‘brand ascension’ department needs to justify their paycheck, presumably.
The genius plan is to replace the ‘i’ from the i3, i5, i7 and i9 branding with the word ‘Ultra’. Because ‘i’ is so 2001, brah.
The change was exposed by a benchmark result for the game Ashes Of The Singularity: Escalation listing a processor called the ‘Intel Ultra 5 1003H’.
Intel spokesperson Bernard Fernandes confirmed the changes, stating the company was at “an inflection point in their client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake CPUs”. Make of that corporate guff what you will.
Many have reacted with bemusement to the change, with Twitter user Franck3E observing: “The I-core branding is actually very good and well-recognized. Doesn’t Intel have bigger issues to fix?”.
With a slowly dwindling market share, profits on the slide and never-ending delays to new manufacturing nodes, we’d be inclined to agree.
Intel continues to recover from its 2020 nadir though, given the positive response to its Raptor Lake CPUs and the relative success of its mid-range ARC GPUs, alongside aggressive price cuts.
Why now? Why for this? Why, whaaat?
Fat corporations get the itch to change their branding occasionally, we know this. But why for Meteor Lake precisely?
Given the radical change in the production process, with each CPU built from multiple chiplets assembled into a finished product, rather than the old-fashioned single die process, perhaps now was a good time for Intel to go big with their shiny new branding.
Personally, I don’t think changing ‘i’ to ‘ultra’ will help the company sell more CPUs. Only ultra-nerds with deep pockets buy high-end CPUs and only care about benchmarks, not the nomenclature. As for the ordinary folk, they just don’t care full stop.
PC sales are slumping in 2023 for several reasons that have nothing to do with naming schemes. What matters is how Meteor Lake performs, not what style of ‘Intel Inside’ label they slap on the box. Let’s just hope they live up to the ultra-hype.
