Many people – and we suspect that includes plenty of folk at Intel too – have been thoroughly confused by its “platform” tag to identify different products it made.
Now Intel people and the rest of the world can breathe a little easier, because it’s said it’s going to stop promoting “platforms” and concentrate on the microprocessors instead, just like it used to. Prepare yourself.
That doesn’t mean that we can wave goodbye forever to brands such as Centrino, which Intel originally pushed as a notebook “platform” which included CPU, chipsets and wi-fi chips. Intel will hang onto that logo to describe wireless chips.
In hindsight, the Centrino “platform” was actually a runaway success, and was closely identified with notebooks – much to the annoyance of chip rival AMD.
But Intel got carried away by the success of Centrino and attempted to do the same for other clusters of microprocessors and chipsets.
And things got even worse when Intel started introducing the Core brand – further complicated when it imposed Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Solo upon an already confused world.
Intel will stick to the word Core and identify how good they are by using the terms i3, i5, and i7. This is also rather confusing of course. It could just call the chips Core Good, Core Better and Core Best.
But that’s not going to happen, is it?
