Intel Changes Processor Naming
By Jessica Davis -- EDN, March 19, 2004
What's in a name? Contrary to Shakespeare's opinion, quite a lot if you are a brand manager or a marketer.
That's why Intel today announced a new way of naming its processors that takes the emphasis off clock speed. Intel hopes the new naming convention, which assigns a number to each processor, will make it easier for consumers to select the most appropriate choice for their particular needs.
"How do you communication the goodness when the definition has changed to include more than just megahertz," asked Don MacDonald, vice president, sales and marketing group and director, worldwide branding and campaigns. "You cannot rely on just megahertz anymore."
As Intel has added more features, such as improved cache, better front side bus speeds, longer battery life for mobile processors, and other technologies coming down the road, the company has not been able to communicate those benefits in the product name alone.
So rather than offer a product name followed by the clock speed as it has in the past, each Intel processor going forward will have a family name and then a processor number. So instead of "Intel Pentium 4 processor 3.40 GHz" the product will now be called "Intel Pentium 4 processor 550." The products features, including clock speed, will be briefly listed after the name.
The naming convention is similar to that of carmaker BMW, MacDonald acknowledged at the press briefing announcing the change. In fact, Intel discussed its plans with BMW before adopting the new naming convention, with an eye to respecting another company's intellectual property.
Intel said the processor number is based on architecture, clock speed, front side bus, cache and future undefined Intel technologies. However, there is no set formula for arriving at a processor number. Each product will go through MacDonald's branding group for naming, a spokesman said.
Intel intends to offer assistance to consumers to interpret processor names at the point of sale and on the Web. The company anticipates conducting training with retail sales people.
MacDonald said the idea for this new program came out of the Centrino program, which he led until early this year when he switched to the branding roll. While head of that program, the question arose as to how you differentiate something that has half the megahertz of another product, but offers other benefits that other product doesn't have.
"If you have kids to shuttle around, a sports car isn't what you want," said MacDonald.
Existing products will retain their same names, but newly released products including the Extreme Edition gaming platform, will follow the new processor naming convention.
Processors for laptops will be in one of three brand categories. Centrino will be 700 series, Pentium 4 will be 500 series and Celeron will be 300 series. On the desktop side, a similar convention will be followed with a 700, 500 and 300 series.
