Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes

I work in CPU security and it's the same with microarchitecture. You wanna know if a machine is vulnerable to a certain issue?

- The technical experts (including Intel engineers) will say something like "it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models'

- Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up).

- The spec sheet for the hardware calls it a "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA"

Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. They also have different names for the same shit depending on whether it's a consumer or server chip.

Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version.

Usually I just ask the LLM and accept that it's wrong 20% of the time.

Since everyone is complaining about the naming schemes of CPUs, I'll pitch in.

An Intel Core Ultra 7 155U and a Core Ultra 7 155H, are very different classes of CPUs!

If you're comparing laptops, you'll see both listed, and laptops with the U variant will be significantly cheaper, because you get half the max TDP, 4 fewer cores, 8 fewer threads, and a worse GPU.

This isn't to say the 155U is a bad chip, it's just a low-power optimized chip, while the 155H is a high-performance chip, and the difference between their performance characteristics is a lot larger than you'd expect when looking at the model numbers. Heck, if you didn't know better, you might text your tech-savvy friend "hey is a 155 good?", and looking that up would bring up the powerful H version.

Do you think Intel names things poorly?

NVidia has these, very different GPUs:

Quadro 6000, Quadro RTX 6000, RTX A6000, RTX 6000 Ada, RTX 6000 Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Max-Q Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Server Edition

Because I don't follow CPUs constantly and only check in from time to time, all the code names (for cores, CPUs and platforms), generations, marketing names, model numbers, etc make it hopelessly confusing. And it's not just Intel but AMD and other companies have been doing this chronically for >10 years. It seems almost like intentional obfuscation yet I can't really think of a long-term reason that creating confusion systemically is in the company's interest. Sure, every company occasionally has a certain generation they might like to forget but that's too unpredictable to be the motivation behind such a consistent long-term pattern.

So I suspect maybe it's just a perverse effect of successive generations of marketing and product managers each coming up with a new system "to fix the confusion?" What's strange is that there's enough history here that smart people should be able to recognize there's a chronic problem and address it. For example, relatively simple patterns like Era Name (like "Core"), Generation Number, Model Number - Speed and then a two digit sub-signifier for all the technical variants. Just two digits of upper case letters and digits 1-9 is enough to encode >1200 sub-variants within each Era/Gen/Model/Speed.

The maddening part is that they not only change the classifiers, they also sometimes change the number and/or hierarchy of classifiers, which eliminates any hope of simply mapping the old taxonomy to the new.

That reminds me when I got a server-grade Xeon E5472 (LGA771) and after some very minor tinkering (knife, sticker mod) fit it into a cheap consumer-grade LGA775 socket. Same microarchitecture, power delivery class, all that.

LGA2011-0 and LGA2011-1 are very unalike, from the memory controller to vast pin rearrangement.

So not only they call two different sockets almost the same per the post, but they also call essentially the same sockets differently to artificially segment the market.

I recall standing in CEX one day perusing the cabinet of random electronics ( as you do ) and wondering why the Intel CPUs were so cheap compared to the AMD ones. I eventually concluded that the cross generation compatibility of zen cpus meant they had a better resale value. Whereas if you experienced the more common mobo failure with an Intel chip you were likely looking at replacing both.

I agree their name scheme sucks. But the way to buy a new CPU is to check with the motherboard vendor about what CPUs the motherboard supports. You can't expect it to work (although it may) if the motherboard maker doesn't list it as supported.

Having some portion of the socket name stay the same can still be helpful to show that the same heatsinks are supported. I agree there are many far better ways Intel could handle this.

I don't know why, but most tech companies are horrible at naming products.

It has pretty much always been the case that you need to make sure the motherboard supports the specific chip you want to use, and that you can't rely on just the physical socket as an indicator of compatibility (true for AMD as well). For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips. OEM stuff like this can be more of a crapshoot.

All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets. LGA to indicate it's land grid array (CPU has flat "lands" on it, pins are on the motherboard), 2011 because it has 2011 pins. FC because it's flip chip packaging.

LGA2011 was an especially cursed era of processors and motherboards.

In addition to all of the slightly different sockets there was ddr3, ddr3 low voltage, the server/ecc counterparts, and then ddr4 came out but it was so expensive (almost more expensive than 4/5 is now compared to what it should be) that there were goofy boards that had DDR3 & DDR4 slots.

By the way it is _never_ worth attempting to use or upgrade anything from this era. Throw it in the fucking dumpster (at the e waste recycling center). The onboard sata controllers are rife with data corruption bugs and the caps from around then have a terrible reputation. Anything that has made it this long without popping is most likely to have done so from sitting around powered off. They will also silently drop PCI-E lanes even at standard BCLK under certain utilization patterns that cause too much of a vdrop.

This is part of why Intel went damn-near scorched earth on the motherboard partners that released boards which broke the contractual agreement and allowed you to increase the multipliers on non-K processors. The lack of validation under these conditions contributed to the aformentioned issues.

Intel and AMD naming schemes are extremely confusing these days. I can understand that naming these things must be really complicated these days since we have different core counts, thread counts, different types of cores, different clock speeds etc, but still

This reminds me of my ASRock motherboard, though this was over a decade ago now. The actual board was one piece of hardware, but the manual it shipped with was for a different piece of hardware. Very similar, but not identical (and worse, not identical where I needed them to be, which, naturally, is both the only reason I noticed and how these things get noticed…), but yet both manual and motherboard had the same model number. ASRock themselves appeared utterly unaware that they had two separate models wandering around bearing the same name, even after it was pointed out to them.

The next motherboard (should RAM ever cease being the tulip du jour) will not be an ASRock, for that and other reasons.

For the love of everything though, just increment the model number.

Cross-socket E7-8890 v4/Socket LGA2011-1 GPU/CPU extensions for Blackwell 100.

at least they are not renaming retroactively.

looking at you USB 3.0 (or USB 3.1 Gen 1 (or USB 3.2 Gen 1))

Yeah, Intel has some crazies in the naming department since they abandoned Netburst with clear generation number and frequency in the name. I remember having two CPUs with exact same name E6300 for the exact same socket LGA775, but the difference was 1 GHz and cache size. Like, ok, I can understand that they were close enough, but at least add something to the model number to distinguish them.

It's fascinating how 'Naming Schemes' are supposed to clarify hierarchy but end up creating more chaos. When the signifier (FCLGA2011) detaches from the signified (physical compatibility), the system is officially broken. Feels like a hardware version of a bureaucratic loop.

In fairness, the author should've known something was up when they thought they could put a multiple year newer chip in an Intel board. That sort of cross-generational compatibility may exist in AMD land but never in Intel.

How dare they accuse Intel of any kind of naming scheme at all. Everyone who’s anyone knows it’s an act of stochastic terrorism.

Wow $15 for that CPU sounds great.

Sounds like a great candidate for a Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph.

This isn't that bad if you compare it to the USB naming fiasco... but yeah, definitely a problem in the tech industry for a long time.

They have to make “shit creek” to put a end to all those water bodies.

How did the title end up wrong on HN (schemes vs scenes) and what's the mechanism to get a mod to fix it?

this is a perfect example of how technically correct specs can still be deeply misleading. Intel reusing FCLGA2011 across incompatible sockets feels like a trap even experienced builders can fall into. Thanks for documenting the failure mode so clearly—this will probably save someone else from buying the same $15 paperweight.