Intel's # SYSTEM

[Atomic77]

This might be stupid to ask but I know intel has i3 i5 i7 processors but what happened to i6?????

 

[sneekypeet]

what about i4 then?

 

[95Viper]

Some have speculated this... BMW series 3/5/7.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

This might be stupid to ask but I know intel has i3 i5 i7 processors but what happened to i6?????

Because they went from using numbers that correspond to actual specs, to numbers that refer to a widespread range of performance.

Thus i3 = low range, i5 = mid range, and i7 = high range. It's purely marketing vs tech reasons.

 

[SaltyFish]

If we follow the numbering system, Intel's HEDT CPUs make up the "i9" line. But yes, it's a simple short-hand for low/mid/high-end. Even AMD has followed suit with their video cards.

 

[Atomic77]

Hmm I guess that makes sense thanks for helping.

 

[kn00tcn]

well it's also good to keep some gaps

when core2 came out, you may remember there was e6### & e4###, later on e5### came

 

[Caring1]

That doesn't explain the stupidity in having Celerons, Pentiums, Atoms, Dual Cores, Core Two Duos, then Dual Core Atoms, which then became Celerons and Pentiums again ... Intels naming system is designed to confuse people, not to mention dual core i7's in laptops when people expect quad core.

 

[Frick]

An electronics store in town explained it like this: i3 = three cores, i5 = 5 cores, i7 = 7 cores. The manager is a friend of mine, and he looked totally confused when I explained that is not how it works.

 

[Atomic77]

I know it is confusing I was not to sure about how it worked either till I did some internet searching on it. It seems like the video card numbering system is confusing also.

 

[theonedub]

That doesn't explain the stupidity in having Celerons, Pentiums, Atoms, Dual Cores, Core Two Duos, then Dual Core Atoms, which then became Celerons and Pentiums again ... Intels naming system is designed to confuse people, not to mention dual core i7's in laptops when people expect quad core.

Yeah, the i7 thing is odd- but all mobile true quad core i7's have a Q in the model number. I think that's easy enough to understand.

 

[xvi]

The weird naming scheme isn't too uncommon. For Intel, the lineup is loosely as follows:

Pentium: Dual core, no HyperThreading
Core i3: Dual core, with HyperThreading
Core i5: Quad core, no HyperThreading
Core i7: Quad core (usually), with HyperThreading (The only exception being the very high end 6-core versions)

ot to mention dual core i7's in laptops when people expect quad core.

Recently researched this for my socket G1 laptop. The performance difference between the i5 and the i7 was within only a few percent. There are quad-core Mobile i7s that generation, but I need one with the integrated graphics (which the quads don't have).

 

[hat]

One thing I never understood is SB-E is i7-3xxx, and not some 2xxx number like the regular SB CPUs. Then IVB-E is 4xxx when standard IVB CPUs are 3xxx, and so on with Haswell... It also makes no sense to me that we have an 8 core/16 thread i7 chip, while i7 traditionally was 4c/8t.