Intel Rebrands Kaby Lake Pentiums as Pentium Gold

With every new product release, the old naming schemes get more and more complex. Due to the increasing complexity of their lineup, Intel is shaking up the way things are named. Starting November 2nd 2017, Intel is breaking apart the current Pentium lineup in two. Instead of the current Pentium, there will now be Pentium Gold and Pentium Silver. Interestingly enough, there will be no new products. Both lineups will be rebranding current processors starting with 7th Gen Kaby Lake Pentiums.

The Gold and Silver branding reflect the recent changes to the Xeon lineup. At the top, we have the Pentium Gold which consists of the MSDT (mainstream desktop) processors. These are the current desktop Pentium processors using the Core architecture. In addition, we have Pentium Silver which are the ULP (ultra low power) processors. These processors use the new low power Gemini Lake architecture.

Intel Pentium Shake Up Long Time Coming

The change in the lineup is due to the expansion of the Pentium brand. Pentiums used to be simple dual-core processors. As a result of new products, Pentiums now vary widely. Desktop Pentiums gained HyperThreading while mobile Atom chips got promoted to Pentium as well. Due to the wide range of performance, it is now necessary to split up the Pentium family. Overall, the changes are just to the branding and retail packages.

In my opinion, Intel has delayed this change for far too long. The top and bottom of the Pentium lineup currently spans too big a performance range. Instead of using Pentium Silver and Gold though, perhaps expanding Celeron would be better. Hopefully, Intel will keep updating their brands to make sense to consumers. With the move to hexacore mainstream CPUs, Intel has a good chance to update their branding. Let’s hope they don’t waste it.