Intel Corporation
Intel typically uses CES to fill out the processor lineup it launched late the previous year, and that hasn’t changed this year. The company announced a full lineup of 14th Gen desktop Core CPUs, some new 14th Gen Core CPUs for gaming laptops and high-end workstations, and the first non-Ultra chipsets to carry the new “Core 3/5/7” . The brand that ditches generational branding entirely. We will review updates soon.
But what I’m taking away, as a long-time observer of processor branding, is that Intel has made its new naming system more confusing for people who actually want to know what type of processor they’re getting.
Intel said in October that it was committed to the 14th generation branding for its new desktop CPUs because they were too similar to the 13th generation chips (they all used the same Raptor Lake core architecture, itself a slight revision of the 12th generation Alder Lake). It makes some sense for it to be expanded to include the HX series laptop chips, as it has always been desktop silicon repackaged for laptop use. So far, so good.
But what’s frustrating is that the new Series 1 Core 7, Core 5 and Core 3 chips also rely on Raptor Lake overclocking, rather than the all-new Meteor Lake architecture used in the Core Ultra CPUs that Intel announced a month ago. since. The Core 7 150U, Core 5 120U, and Core 3 100U share the same key specifications with last year’s 13th generation U-series processors, including the number of CPU cores (one P core and either 4 or 8 E cores, depending on the chip) , Support for random access memory (RAM), graphics processing unit (GPU), and power usage. It also lacks new Meteor Lake features like the NPU and integrated Intel Arc graphics.
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We won’t even talk about the phrase “Intel Core (1 Series) U-series processors,” which is a string of seven words that includes both “series” and “processors” twice.
Intel Corporation
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There’s nothing really new about the Core platform, compared to the 13th generation U-series chips.
Intel Corporation
The difference is that the 1-series chips have increasingly boosted their maximum clock speeds, and the Intel Iris Do not change). Other than that, they feel almost as different from Intel’s 13th generation CPUs as other processors in the 14th generation Core lineup, which is to say “not quite.”
None of this is to say that the Series 1 Core chipset is egregious or unprecedented; For better or worse, Intel and other companies release modified versions of older chips as “new” versions all the time. But announcing a major generational brand change, then withholding the new brand from some products because they are too similar to the old products, and then applying the new brand to… last Products that Just As with the elderly it is confusing. This is the same company that recently built a chipset that accuses AMD of playing branding games designed to mislead people about the lifespan of its processors. You can, at the very least, look for the “Ultra” label to reliably separate brand new slides from old ones. But it’s not immediately clear how the new brand scheme is better or less confusing than the old one.
But I digress.
The new Core-branded chips will arrive in laptops starting this quarter. Here’s what you need to know about the rest of Intel’s 14th generation chips.