- The technical experts (including Intel engineers) will say something like "it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models'

- Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up).

- The spec sheet for the hardware calls it a "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA"

Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. They also have different names for the same shit depending on whether it's a consumer or server chip.

Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version.

Usually I just ask the LLM and accept that it's wrong 20% of the time.

NVidia has these, very different GPUs:

Quadro 6000, Quadro RTX 6000, RTX A6000, RTX 6000 Ada, RTX 6000 Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Max-Q Workstation Edition, RTX 6000 Server Edition

An Intel Core Ultra 7 155U and a Core Ultra 7 155H, are very different classes of CPUs!

If you're comparing laptops, you'll see both listed, and laptops with the U variant will be significantly cheaper, because you get half the max TDP, 4 fewer cores, 8 fewer threads, and a worse GPU.

This isn't to say the 155U is a bad chip, it's just a low-power optimized chip, while the 155H is a high-performance chip, and the difference between their performance characteristics is a lot larger than you'd expect when looking at the model numbers. Heck, if you didn't know better, you might text your tech-savvy friend "hey is a 155 good?", and looking that up would bring up the powerful H version.

LGA2011-0 and LGA2011-1 are very unalike, from the memory controller to vast pin rearrangement.

So not only they call two different sockets almost the same per the post, but they also call essentially the same sockets differently to artificially segment the market.

All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets. LGA to indicate it's land grid array (CPU has flat "lands" on it, pins are on the motherboard), 2011 because it has 2011 pins. FC because it's flip chip packaging.

Having some portion of the socket name stay the same can still be helpful to show that the same heatsinks are supported. I agree there are many far better ways Intel could handle this.

In addition to all of the slightly different sockets there was ddr3, ddr3 low voltage, the server/ecc counterparts, and then ddr4 came out but it was so expensive (almost more expensive than 4/5 is now compared to what it should be) that there were goofy boards that had DDR3 & DDR4 slots.

By the way it is _never_ worth attempting to use or upgrade anything from this era. Throw it in the fucking dumpster (at the e waste recycling center). The onboard sata controllers are rife with data corruption bugs and the caps from around then have a terrible reputation. Anything that has made it this long without popping is most likely to have done so from sitting around powered off. They will also silently drop PCI-E lanes even at standard BCLK under certain utilization patterns that cause too much of a vdrop.

This is part of why Intel went damn-near scorched earth on the motherboard partners that released boards which broke the contractual agreement and allowed you to increase the multipliers on non-K processors. The lack of validation under these conditions contributed to the aformentioned issues.

So I suspect maybe it's just a perverse effect of successive generations of marketing and product managers each coming up with a new system "to fix the confusion?" What's strange is that there's enough history here that smart people should be able to recognize there's a chronic problem and address it. For example, relatively simple patterns like Era Name (like "Core"), Generation Number, Model Number - Speed and then a two digit sub-signifier for all the technical variants. Just two digits of upper case letters and digits 1-9 is enough to encode >1200 sub-variants within each Era/Gen/Model/Speed.

The maddening part is that they not only change the classifiers, they also sometimes change the number and/or hierarchy of classifiers, which eliminates any hope of simply mapping the old taxonomy to the new.

The next motherboard (should RAM ever cease being the tulip du jour) will not be an ASRock, for that and other reasons.

For the love of everything though, just increment the model number.

looking at you USB 3.0 (or USB 3.1 Gen 1 (or USB 3.2 Gen 1))