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by moe 3940 days ago
Tangential rant: What is wrong with CPU manufacturers in particular?

What do they gain from giving everything the most confusing names possible?

Sockets LGA1155, LGA1150, LGA1151. CPUs only differentiated by a jumble of digits anymore.

Something is seriously wrong with your product naming strategy when it needs to be clarified that ARM7 != ARMv7.

1 comments

Intel uses the letters to indicate the type of connection between the CPU and motherboard. So LGA = Land Grid Array [1]. The number is the number of pins/contacts connecting the CPU to the motherboard. So LGA1155 is a Land Grid Array Socket with 1,155 pins.

It's definitely not random, at least not with Intel. ARM is confusing as hell though. Part of the issue is that there is the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that has different versions, and then there are different ARM CPU architectures, but those two don't necessarily need to correspond.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_grid_array

So LGA1155 is a Land Grid Array Socket with 1,155 pins.

Their scheme may be somewhat internally consistent (until they change it again next year). The information it conveys remains completely useless.

Nobody cares about the number of pins on a socket or which "generation" a CPU belongs to.

We want to know which CPU is compatible to which socket, and how CPUs compare on their key metrics.

So here's a useful naming scheme: Sockets should be called S1, S2, S3 [...]

CPUs should be called: S1-8-40W-PM15000

That would be an 8 core CPU for Socket S1 that draws 40W and scores PassMark 15000.

If Intel & co insist on making us sift through hostile numeric identifiers then they should at least make them useful.