Pentium? Core i5? Core i7? Making sense of Intel’s convoluted CPU lineup
Our creative director Aurich Lawson is building a PC to power a custom arcade cabinet, and he was having trouble picking a processor. Not because he didn’t know what he needed, but because he was having trouble matching what he needed (the cheapest quad-core CPU that meets the recommended requirements for Street Fighter V) with what Intel was offering (five different obfuscated brands spread out over multiple sockets and architectures).
And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing. Around the turn of the millennium you just had Celeron and Pentium. One name meant “cut-down low-end” and one meant “high-end, more features,” and you just bought the fastest one you could reasonably afford. Things got a little more confusing in the Core and Core 2 days (the Core branding continues to survive alongside the Celeron and Pentium brands), but you could at least use names like “Core Solo” and “Core 2 Quad” to guess which architecture and how many cores you were getting. Now there are three separate Core brands, Pentium and Celeron brands, and a long series of letters that you need to know to figure out what CPU you’re getting.
