Last month we heard that Intel was planning on shaking up the branding for its long-running sequence of Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 CPUs. Not an enormous shake-up — the truth is about as innocuous as issues may be, merely dropping a single letter from every one. Today it’s official: Starting with Meteor Lake releases later this yr, Intel processors can be named both Core 3, 5, 7, 9, (word the dearth of the “i”) or Core Ultra variants thereof.

That’s in line with a sprawling press launch from Intel itself, which additionally notes that some sub-brand labels like Intel Evo Edition laptops and vPro Enterprise and vPro Essentials gadgets will retain their present labels. Why change issues up now, after greater than 15 years of the Core iNumber setup? Aside from normal ideas like “a change is as good as a rest,” Intel appears to assume that the brand new AI craze is sufficient to deserve the excellence.

Intel

“Meteor Lake…will be the first client processor manufactured on the new Intel 4 process node. It’s the first client chiplet design enabled by Foveros advanced 3D packaging technology, and it will deliver improved power efficiency and graphics performance. It’s also the first Intel client processor to feature a dedicated AI engine: Intel AI Boost,” says the press release.

The new chips may even get a barely up to date visible identification, with some gradient dots added to Intel’s typical blue colour scheme. “Ultra” chips, the most effective and strongest of their generations, will present that label off entrance and heart backside and barely to the left. Intel can also be dropping “generational branding,” labels like “13th-generation Core i5.” But you’ll be able to guess that tech press (like PCWorld) and normal nerds (additionally like PCWorld) will most likely follow that moniker, if just for a simple technique to differentiate newer designs from older ones.