Source: Intel
A rebranding of Intel’s consumer CPUs has been rumored for some time now, but an announcement from the company today made it official. Starting with Intel’s next-generation Meteor Lake chips, Intel will be dropping the “Gen” and “i” branding from its CPUs, and Core chips will be split into two categories: the regular Core series and the new Core Ultra series.
Overall, not much is actually changing with this new naming scheme. It’s not exactly clear which CPUs are Core and which are Core Ultra, but we do know that 3-class CPUs are only in the Core series and 9-class chips are only in the Core Ultra series, so maybe Core Ultra just means high TDP, unlocked chips. Under that assumption, the current 13th-generation Core i9 13900K would be called the Core Ultra 9 13900K under the new nomenclature. All in all, not that much different.
The obvious question is why Intel is pursuing what seems to be an unnecessary revision to its branding. Although Intel says this is to reflect Meteor Lake’s “inflection point in Intel’s client processor roadmap,” another factor could be the rumored Raptor Lake refresh. It has long been suspected that Meteor Lake’s desktop variant has been canceled, and that 14th-generation desktop chips would instead reuse Raptor Lake from 13th-generation processors, while laptops will get Meteor Lake. By dropping the “14th-generation” at the beginning of the CPU name, it leaves things vague intentionally.
Intel has already gotten some criticism for this move as many have called it a scheme to make the Raptor Lake refresh look actually new, but it’s not like we haven’t seen the company refresh products and try to make them look new before. Intel already rebranded Alder Lake chips as 13th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs, like the Core i3-13100 being a carbon copy of the i3-12100, among others. The old naming scheme didn’t prevent Intel from pretending old stuff was new, and also caused lots of confusion, like putting 10nm Tiger Lake CPUs in the same generation as 14nm Rocket Lake chips. You’ll still be able to tell what generation something is by looking at the first two digits, which is what we’ve always done anyway.