Enlarge / Intel’s Core CPUs are about to get a bit more Ultra.
Intel
As part of an effort to “simplify the Intel brand portfolio,” Intel has announced some changes to its processor branding starting with its next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs.
The smallest change is that Intel’s mainstream CPUs are losing their “i,” shifting from Core i3/i5/i7/i9 to simply Core 3/5/7/9. Intel will also stop using “generational” messaging in its processor branding—none of the new CPUs will be announced, released, or advertised as “14th-generation” anything.
Intel’s generational branding has always been a bit arbitrary, anyway. The “first-generation” Core chips followed several generations of Core and Core 2 processors, the branding Intel started using for its chips in the mid-2000s at the end of the Pentium 4 era. And the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad branding was used for several distinct generations of chips that used different manufacturing technologies and revised architectures.
To make up for the words it’s removing from its branding, Intel is also adding a new one. Its high-end chips will be called Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7, or Core Ultra 9. The company didn’t go into detail about what makes a processor Ultra, though we do know that Core 3 chips cannot be Ultra, while Core 9 chips can only be Ultra.
Processors will still have a “14” in the model number to denote their generation.
Intel
Intel’s CPU model numbers will continue to include generational numbering to help distinguish them from one another, and the company will continue to use suffix letters to distinguish different product segments. So what would have been an “Intel Core i7-14700K Processor” might now be an “Intel Core Ultra 7 processor 14700K” (Intel says it prefers the word “processor” to sit in between the “Core Ultra 7” part and the CPU’s model number).
This is part of a wider shake-up of Intel’s processor branding strategy; last year, the company jettisoned the Pentium and Celeron brand names for low-end laptop CPUs. It now refers to those Intel processors as Intel Processors. AMD has also rejiggered its laptop processor model numbers to account for the fact that it’s shipping several different CPU and GPU pairings under the same “Ryzen 7000” umbrella.