Intel officials are changing the way they refer to their Pentium and Celeron PC processors in an effort to move away from focusing on the raw speed of the chips.
The goal is to make it easier for consumers to understand the multitude of features on each processor—from frequency to bus speeds to cache sizes. For example, the name of the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading technology will be the Pentium 4 550 with Hyper-Threading. The “550” will tell consumers the chip has a clock speed of 3.4GHz, 1MB of Level 2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus, Intel officials said.
The company is still deciding whether to create a similar naming structure for its enterprise chips, such as the Xeon and the Itanium.