[opportune]

With the i branding, a desktop vendor could sell an “i9” using a less performant, old i9 chip that could perform much worse than a new i5. Conversely some i3 chips are rather good but at a glance a consumer will think they are too low-end. This is bad for Intel, a consumer may buy an i9 machine and think “wow, this is terrible for a highend chip, Intel really sucks” because it was a bad i9 or prefer a worse-suited i5 over an i3 due to assuming 5>3.

I’d prefer a more literate convention I described in other comments, but the new convention may at least prevent reductively bucketing skus. The old buckets were just descriptive enough to suggest a quality and performance hierarchy, but dangerously so, because even a 3 could be better than a 9 in some cases.