Meet The New Intel CPU Badges: No More ‘i’ Prefixes, Comes In Core & Core Ultra Versions

Meet The New Intel CPU Badges: No More ‘i’ Prefixes, Comes In Core & Core Ultra Versions

After Intel has confirmed they are indeed rebranding their entire consumer CPU lineup for the first time in 15 years, Intel has now released more info regarding the new branding materials that will be in use starting with the upcoming Meteor Lake series processors in later this year. The Raptor Lake refresh CPUs – also launching this year – will retain its current naming system, making it the final product line to use the current nomenclature.

With the rebrand from Core ‘i’ to now essentially just Core (and Core Ultra), the badges also sees a redesign as well. Fun fact: during Intel’s tick-tock era, the badge gets a redesign every two generations, until 6th Gen “Skylake” broke the cycle. The badge from Skylake onwards carried on until 9th Gen, then 10th Gen sees another redesign that ends up being short-lived, as 11th Gen onwards uses square-based design (which comes with an entire rebrand of Intel as a company, with a new logo to boot) that we see up until this point.

To summarize, the new branding comes in two flavors – though they’re essentially same badge with the standard Core taking a lighter hue of blue, while the Core Ultra variants will feature a deeper blue for easy differentiation. For reference, previous branding differs colors by processor tiering – with higher end tiers gets deeper hues of blue. That is now simplified to just two shades of blue as a result.

Intel will also forgo the generation string such as 12th Gen, 13th Gen, and instead let the processor model number do the talking. The presentation also noted the naming should apply the word “processor” before the numbering, hence the official naming should read like this, for example: “Intel Core 5 processor 1005H”, or “Intel Core Ultra 7 processor 1007H”. In practice though, people will just refer the model number directly and jettison the word “processor” for the most part.

It’s not entirely clear what are the exact purpose of Core Ultra branding just yet, but one possible theory from TechPowerUP is that Intel may decide to sell more than one generations of CPU at a time and use the Ultra to differentiate its latest-generation architecture from the preceding ones. (AMD opted to modify its numbering by using the final two digits to differentiate between architectural generations, though it wasn’t particularly well received by the public due to complexity.)

There’s also other rebranding for its Intel vPro, Intel Evo badging that now uses a horizontal rectangle; there’s also two more badges for use in outer box packaging to denote Intel processor or graphics contained within the device. Intel’s current branding spans across many of its products, including Xeon, Arc, Data Center GPU, Killer and various FPGA products that isn’t mentioned in this rebranding announcement – so it’s not entirely clear if these products will get a new badge at some point in the future.

Pokdepinion: I guess, time to relearn the names all over again…