A Basic Guide to Intel Desktop Processor Names

Introduction

If you have a PC there’s a good chance the CPU was made by Intel[1]. Being the largest CPU company, Intel makes a lot of processors. Of course those processors need names. However I’ve yet to see a guide that goes over what all their processor names mean and make sense to anyone who isn’t a super-nerd. So I’ve decided I’m going to make said guide right here. So let’s get started.

The current generation of Intel processors is called Skylake[2][3]. And it’s going to be what I’m basing the explanations on. I’m only going to talk about the desktop processors because I want to keep this simple. So the main list of processors can be split into three sections, mainstream, budget and performance[4].

Mainstream

Let’s start with talking about the mainstream section, which lies above budget and below performance in terms of price. The mainstream section contains the Core i3 and Core i5 processor series (why they skipped the even numbers is beyond me). As you can expect, the higher number means a better performance with a higher price tag.

Mainstream

The i3s start at $117 at 3.7 GHz on two cores with hyperthreading. This means that while there are only two physical processors inside the CPU, software treats it as if there are four cores[5]. The i5s start at $182 at 2.7 GHz with four cores without hyperthreading. Now you may be wondering why you would pay 60 bucks more if it has less clock speed as well as no hyperthreading. Well a couple of reasons. First clock speed isn’t the only way to measure the speed of a processor. The i5 also does significantly better in benchmarks. Second having four cores without hyperthreading is going to be better than 2 cores with it. And third the i5 enables Intel’s turbo boost mode which makes it so that you can increase the clock speed of the processor in official software[6]. The i5 is also notable for having the lowest priced[7] unlocked or K-series processor. The 6600K at 242 dollars which allows you to change the processor’s clock speed as you wish (at your own risk). Before we move on to the next section of Intel’s processors a note about how many cores each processor has. For now we can safely use the rule that i3s have dual core with hyperthreading and i5s have quad-core without hyperthreading. That holds true for Skylake. But the Haswell processors have i5s with core counts of 4 without hyperthreading and 2 with it. So it’s entirely possible that as the Skylake line-up grows this will happen to the i5s again. If you’re reading this in the future it’s possible that they’ve changed it, so you should check.

Budget

Talking about the budget Skylake processors right now is going to be a bit weird as they’re still rolling out some of the CPUs[8]. The budget Intel processors can be split up into Pentium and Celeron. But the Celerons aren’t out yet (at least to be bought on their own). however the prices and specs have been announced so I can still talk about those. The Pentiums start at $64 and have two cores without hyperthreading. With the cheapest clocked in at 3.3 GHz. The Celerons will also have 2 cores with no hyperthreading. They will start at $42 clocked at 2.8 GHz

All the Numbers

So now you know what all the brand names mean. But what do all the numbers after the brand name mean? Well these are a little complicated and have a few exceptions but just roll with me for now. To look at the numbers let’s use the example of the i5 6600K. We can tell it’s an i5 just by the name but what do all the numbers[9] stand for? The first number the 6 simply stands for the processor’s generation. It has a 6 in front of it. That means it’s a sixth generation core i5. The next three numbers are a little fuzzy as to what they mean. But generally higher is better. A x700 is going to be much better than an x300 of the same processor generation. And finally the letter at the end. Most desktop core CPUs have no letter at the end except for two exceptions[10]. The 6600K and 6700K. As you can see on both of these the letter is a K. In this case the K stands for unlocked. Meaning you can overclock them with relative ease. Outside of desktop there are the H U and Y suffixes. Which either mean optimised for mobile performance. Or just super low power.

So that’s it! Those are the basics to identifying an Intel processor by name. Hopefully their weird naming scheme will no longer confuse you. You should now know what the hell someone is talking about when they bring up an i5 6600K.

Endnotes

[1] Sorry AMD, you just don’t have great market share.

[2] A good list of all of their processor generations can be found here.

[3] Skylake is still pretty new (less than six months old as I write this) so many people are still buying last-gen Haswell processors. As Haswell is more mature and has a larger catalogue due to its age. And people who are buying Skylake are still paying the early adopter premium on Skylake CPUs. But the smaller catalogue with Skylake means it’s easier to explain with. So I’m using that for the example.

[4] Wikipedia’s list has just two categories: mainstream and performance, but I think having budget as a category makes sense here.

[5] Hyperthreading is obviously a bit more complicated than that. But we aren’t here to talk about the mechanics of hyperthreading. This is a video that goes over it a bit more.

[6] The i5s also have a larger cache, for what that’s worth.

[7] For the Skylake processors anyway.

[8] Though from what I gather they’re already bring put in pre-built computers, you just can’t buy them on their own.

[9] And in this case, the letter at the end.

[10] In the desktop processor line there are also processors with the T suffix. This just means that they use up slightly less electricity at the cost of some computing power. I just didn’t bring it up here because I didn’t want to complicate things.