Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes

Posted by LorenDB 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by bjackman 1 day ago

I work in CPU security and it's the same with microarchitecture. You wanna know if a machine is vulnerable to a certain issue?

- 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.

Comment by josephg 1 day ago

> - 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).

I’m doing some OS work at the moment and running into this. I’m really surprised there’s no caniuse.com for cpu features. I’m planning on requiring support for all the features that have been in every cpu that shipped in the last 10+ years. But it’s basically impossible to figure that out. Especially across Intel and amd. Can I assume apic? Iommu stuff? Is acpi 2 actually available on all CPUs or do I need to have to have support for the old version as well? It’s very annoying.

Comment by johncolanduoni 22 hours ago

Even more fun is that some of those (IOMMU and ACPI version) depend on motherboard/firmware support. Inevitably there is some bargain-bin board for each processor generation that doesn’t support anything that isn’t literally required for the CPU/chipset to POST. For userspace CPU features the new x86_64-v3/v4 profiles that Clang/LLVM support are good Schelling points, but they don’t cover e.g. page table features.

Windows has specific platform requirements they spell out for each version - those are generally your best bet on x86. ARM devs have it way worse so I guess we shouldn’t complain.

Comment by throwaway173738 20 hours ago

At least on ARM you can get trms or data sheets that cover all of the features of a specific processor and also the markings on the chip that differentiate it from models within the same family.

Comment by throw0101a 20 hours ago

> I’m planning on requiring support for all the features that have been in every cpu that shipped in the last 10+ years. But it’s basically impossible to figure that out.

The easiest thing would probably to specify the need for "x86-64-v3":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...

RHEL9 mandated "x86-64-v2", and v3 is being considered for RHEL10:

> The x86-64-v3 level has been implemented first in Intel’s Haswell CPU generation (2013). AMD implemented x86-64-v3 support with the Excavator microarchitecture (2015). Intel’s Atom product line added x86-64-v3 support with the Gracemont microarchitecture (2021), but Intel has continued to release Atom CPUs without AVX support after that (Parker Ridge in 2022, and an Elkhart Lake variant in 2023).

* https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/01/02/exploring-...

Comment by cesarb 19 hours ago

> The easiest thing would probably to specify the need for "x86-64-v3"

AFAIK, that only specifies the user-space-visible instruction set extensions, not the presence and version of operating-system-level features like APIC or IOMMU.

Comment by nemetroid 15 hours ago

RHEL10 has been released and does require x86-64-v3.

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7066628

Comment by baq 1 day ago

I’m pretty sure the number of people at Intel who can tell you offhandedly the answer to your questions about only Intel processors is approximately zero give or take couple. Digging would be required.

If you were willing to accept only the relatively high power variants it’d be easier.

Comment by josephg 22 hours ago

I'd be happy to support the low power variants as well, but without spending a bunch of money, I have no idea what features they have and what they're missing. Its very annoying.

For anyone not familiar with caniuse, its indispensable for modern web development. Say you want to put images on a web page. You've heard of webp. Can you use it?

https://caniuse.com/webp

At a glance you see the answer. 95% of global web users use a web browser with webp support. Its available in all the major browsers, and has been for several years. You can query basically any browser feature like this to see its support status.

Comment by jdiff 21 hours ago

That initial percentage is a little misleading. It includes everything that caniuse isn't sure about. Really it should be something like 97.5±2.5 but the issue's been stalled for years.

Even the absolute most basic features that have been well supported for 30 years, like the HTML "div" element, cap out at 96%. Change the drop-down from "all users" to "all tracked" and you'll get a more representative answer.

Comment by ack_complete 13 hours ago

This is unfortunately the same for GPUs. The graphics APIs expose capability bits or extensions indicating what features the hardware and driver supports, but the graphics vendors don't always publish documentation on what generations of their hardware support various features, so your program is expected to dynamically adapt to arbitrary combinations of features. This is no longer as bad as it used to be due to consolidation in the graphics market, but people still have to build ad-hoc crowd sourced databases of GPU caps bits.

It's also not monotonic, on both CPU and GPU sides features can go away later because either due to a hardware bug or the vendor lost interest in supporting it.

Comment by bombcar 15 hours ago

Even defining "shipped in the last 10 years" is tricky - because does that mean released or final shipment from the factory or ?

You're often better picking a subset of CPU features you want to use and then sampling to see if it excludes something important.

Comment by josephg 12 hours ago

> then sampling to see if it excludes something important.

But how? That’s the question.

Comment by opan 11 hours ago

CPU Monkey had some neat info like whether a CPU had AV1 hwdec/hwenc, then they redesigned their site and that info is gone for some reason. I think it was a year or less between finding their site and them ruining it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250616224354/https://www.cpu-m...

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_pro_8840u

A nice reminder to stick any page you find useful in the wayback machine and/or save a local copy.

Comment by automatic6131 1 day ago

> AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year

Aha, but which digit? Sure, that's easy for server, HEDT and desktop (it's the first one) but if you look at their line of laptop chips then it all breaks down.

Comment by pezezin 20 hours ago

Lol no, for servers (Epyc) it is the last digit. Why? Who knows, to make it more confusing I guess.

Comment by zamadatix 19 hours ago

I admit it took me until the 4th gen Epyc to realize this. I laughed out loud at myself/the numbering scheme.

Comment by adamsb6 16 hours ago

Well yeah Epyc is little endian

Comment by hedgehog 17 hours ago

Oh, the Xeons are with the vX vs vY nonsense, where the same number but a different version is an entirely different CPU (like the 2620 v1 and v2 are different microarchitecture generations and core counts). But, not to leave AMD out, they do things like the Ryzen 7000 series which are Zen 4 except for the models that are Zen 2 (!). (yes if you read the middle digits there's some indication but that's not that helpful for normal customers).

Comment by duxup 18 hours ago

That's been the case with hardware at several companies I was at.

I was convinced that the process was encouraged by folks who used it as a sort of weird gatekeeping by folks who only used the magic code names.

Even better I worked at a place where they swapped code names between two products at one time... it wasn't without any reason, but it mean that a lot of product documentation suddenly conflicted.

I eventually only refereed to exact part numbers and model numbers and refused to play the code name game. This turned into an amusing situation where some managers who only used code names were suddenly silent as they clearly didn't know the product / part to code name convention.

Comment by 7bees 1 day ago

You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links. AMD has a similar site with similar functionality (except that AFAIK it won't let you easily get a list of products with a given uarch). These both have their faults, but I'd certainly pick them over an LLM.

But you're correct that for anything buried in the guts of CPUID, your life is pain. And Intel's product branding has been a disaster for years.

Comment by masklinn 21 hours ago

> You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links.

Intel removed most things older than SB late 2024 (a few xeons remain but afaik anything consumer was wiped with no warning). It’s virtually guaranteed that Intel will remove more stuff in the future.

Comment by mastax 18 hours ago

Also technically the code names are only for unreleased products so on ark it’ll say “products formerly Ice Lake” but the intel will continue to calm them Ice Lake.

Comment by wyldfire 19 hours ago

> Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them.

I've found that -- as of a ~decade ago, at least, ark.intel.com had a really good way to cross-reference among codenames / SKUs / part numbers / feature set/specs. I've never seen errata there but they might be. Also, I haven't used it in a long time so it could've gotten worse.

Comment by bjackman 17 hours ago

Intel do have a website where you can look up SKUs. If you wait long enough and exploit certain bugs in the JS you can get it to give you a bunch of CSV files.

Now the only issue you have is that there is no consistent schema between those files so it's not really any use.

Comment by balou23 21 hours ago

I hear you.

Coincidentally, if anyone knows how to figure out which Intel CPUs actually support 5-level paging / the CPUID flag known as la57, please tell me.

Comment by countWSS 1 day ago

I've also found the same thing a decade ago, apparently lots of features(e.g. specific instruction, igpu) are broadly advertised as belonging to specific arch, but pentium/celeron(or for premium stuff non-xeon) models often lack them entirely and the only way to detect is lscpu/feature bits/digging in UEFI settings.

Comment by zrm 23 hours ago

These have been my go-to for a while now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors

It doesn't have the CPUID but it's a pretty good mapping of model numbers to code names and on top of that has the rest of the specs.

Comment by andrewf 1 day ago

>"it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models'

"Products formerly Blizzard Creek"

WTF does that even mean?

Comment by 7bees 1 day ago

Intel doesn't like to officially use codenames for products once they have shipped, but those codenames are used widely to delineate different families (even by them!), so they compromise with the awkward "products formerly x" wording. Have done for a long time.

Comment by orthoxerox 1 day ago

I wouldn't mind them coming up with better codenames anyway. "Some lower-end SKUs branded as Raptor Lake are based on Alder Lake, with Golden Cove P-cores and Alder Lake-equivalent cache and memory configurations." How can anyone memorize this endless churn of lakes, coves and monts? They could've at least named them in the alphabetical order.

Comment by jorvi 23 hours ago

AMD does this subterfuge as well. Put Zen 2 cores from 2019 (!) in some new chip packaging and sell it as Ryzen 10 / 100. Suddenly these chips seem as fresh as Zen 5.

It's fraud, plain and simple.

Comment by tormeh 1 day ago

The entire point of code names is that you can delay coming up with a marketing name. If the end user sees the code name then what is even the point? Using the code name in external communication is really really dumb. They need to decide if it should be printed on the box or if it's only for internal use, and don't do anything in between.

Comment by adrian_b 18 hours ago

The problem, especially at Intel, but also at AMD, is that they sell very different CPUs under approximately identical names.

In a very distant past, AMD was publishing what the CPUID instruction will return for each CPU model that they were selling. Now this is no longer true, so you have to either buy a CPU to discover what it really is, or to hope that a charitable soul who has bought such a CPU will publish on the Internet the result.

Without having access to the CPUID information, the next best is to find on the Intel Ark site, whether the CPU model you see listed by some shop is described for instance as belonging to 'Products formerly Arrow Lake S", as that will at least identify the product microarchitecture.

This is still not foolproof, because the products listed as "formerly ..." may still be packaged in several variants and they may have various features disabled during production, so you can still have surprises when you test them for the first time.

Comment by baq 1 day ago

Product lines are in design and development for years, two years is lightning fast, code names can be found for things five or more years before they were released, so everyone who works with them knows them better (much better) than the retail names.

Comment by numpad0 1 day ago

It means Intel M14 and M15 base designs. Except they don't use numbers.

Comment by ErroneousBosh 1 day ago

I feel like it's a cultural thing with the designers. Ceragon were the exact same when I used to do microwave links. Happy to provide demo kit, happy to provide sales support, happy to actually come up and go through their product range.

But if you want any deep and complex technical info out of them, like oh maybe how to configure it to fit UK/EU regulatory domain RF rules? Haha no chance.

We ended up hiring a guy fluent in Hebrew just to talk to their support guys.

Super nice kit, but I guess no-one was prepared to pay for an interface layer between the developers and the outside world.

Comment by 7bit 1 day ago

I have three Ubuntu servers and the naming pisses me off so much. Why can't they just stick with their YY.MM. naming scheme everywhere. Instead, they mostly use code names and I never know what codename I am currently using and what is the latest code name. When I have to upgrade or find a specific Python ppa for whatever OS I am running, I need to research 30 minutes to correlate all these dumb codenames to the actual version numbers.

Same with Intel.

STOP USING CODENAMES. USE NUMBERS!

Comment by kalleboo 1 day ago

As an Apple user, the macOS code names stopped being cute once they ran out of felines, and now I can't remember which of Sonoma or Sequoia was first.

Android have done this right: when they used codenames they did them in alphabetical order, and at version 10 they just stopped being clever and went to numbers.

Comment by black3r 22 hours ago

Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy", and useless if you know you have 24.04 but have no idea what its codename is and

Android also sucks for developers because they have the public facing numbers and then API versions which are different and not always scaling linearly (sometimes there is something like "Android 8.1" or "Android 12L" with a newer API), and as developers you always deal with the API numbers (you specify minimum API version, not the minimum "OS version" your code runs in your code), and have to map that back to version numbers the users and managers know to present it to them when you're upping the minimum requirements...

Comment by happymellon 20 hours ago

> Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy"

Well, it was until they looped.

Xenial Xerus is older than Questing Quokka. As someone out of the Ubuntu loop for a very long time, I wouldn't know what either of those mean anyway and would have guessed the age wrong.

Comment by 20 hours ago

Comment by skeletal88 1 day ago

Yes, I agree, codenames are stupid, they are not funny or clever.

I want a version number that I can compare to other versions, to be able to easily see which one is newer or older, to know what I can or should install.

I don't want to figure out and remember your product's clever nicknames.

Comment by daedric7 23 hours ago

They can't. They used to, until they tried to patent 586...

Comment by Meneth 23 hours ago

Trademark.

Comment by taneliv 23 hours ago

Protip, if you have access to the computer: `lsb_release -a` should list both release and codename. This command is not specific to Ubuntu.

Finding the latest release and codename is indeed a research task. I use Wikipedia[1] for that, but I feel like this should be more readily available from the system itself. Perhaps it is, and I just don't know how?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h 20 hours ago

> Protip, if you have access to the computer: `lsb_release -a` should list both release and codename. This command is not specific to Ubuntu.

I typically prefer

  cat /etc/os-release
which seems to be a little more portable / likely to work out of the box on many distros.

Comment by cesarb 19 hours ago

That's only if the distro is recent enough; sooner or later, you'll encounter a box running a distro version from before /etc/os-release became the standard, and you'll have to look for the older distro-specific files like /etc/debian_version.

Comment by Denvercoder9 16 hours ago

> you'll encounter a box running a distro version from before /etc/os-release became the standard

Do those boxes really still exist? Debian, which isn't really known to be the pinacle of bleeding edge, has had /etc/os-release since Debian 7, released in May 2013. RHEL 7, the oldest Red Hat still in extended support, also has it.

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h 13 hours ago

> the oldest Red Hat still in extended support, also has it.

You would be alarmed to know how long the long tail is. Are you going to run into many pre-RHEL 7 boxes? No. Depending on where you are in the industry, are you likely to run into some ancient RHEL boxes, perhaps even actual Red Hat (not Enterprise) Linux? Yeah, it happens.

Comment by Saris 17 hours ago

Same problem I have with Debian.

At least Fedora just uses a version number!

Comment by kevin_thibedeau 16 hours ago

I like to think that Buster, Bullseye, and Bookworm was a ploy to make people more dependent on the version number.

Comment by Saris 16 hours ago

I work with Debian daily and I still couldn't tell you what order those go in. but Debian 12, Debian 13, etc.. is perfectly easy to remember and search for.

Comment by marcosdumay 14 hours ago

Debian is trying hard to switch to numbers. It's the user base that is resisting the change.

Maybe they should stop synlinking the new versions after 14, because AFAIK, they already tried everything else.

Comment by Saris 14 hours ago

Yeah if they just stopped using a release name that'd probably do it, although communities can be surprisingly stubborn on some things.

Comment by throwaway173738 20 hours ago

Try cat /etc/os-release. The codenames are probably there. I know they are for Debian.

Comment by ramses0 19 hours ago

Thank you! I was just about to kvetch about how difficult it was to map (eg) "Trixie" == "13" because /etc/debian_version didn't have it... I always ended up having to search the internet for it which seemed especially dumb for Debian!

Comment by greggsy 23 hours ago

Do you just have banks of old CPUs from every generation to test against?

Comment by bjackman 17 hours ago

Nope. Recently I had to use my company card to buy an ancient mini-PC from eBay just so I could get access to a certain Skylake model

Comment by TiredOfLife 21 hours ago

> 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.

Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen#Mobile_6 Ryzen 7000 series you could get zen2, zen3, zen3+, zen4

Comment by numpad0 23 hours ago

  - sSpec S0ABC                   = "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 version 5 grade 6 getConfig(HT=off, NX=off, ECC=on, VT-x=off, VT-d=on)=4X Stepping B0  
  - "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 -> V3 of Socket FCBGA12345 -> chipset "Pleiades Mounds"   
  - CPUID leaf 0x3aa              = Model specific feature set checks for "Blizzard Creek" and "Windy Bluff(aka Blizzard Creek V2)"  
  - asserts bit 63                = that buggy VT-d circuit is not off  
  - "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA"   = marketing name to confuse specifically you(but also IA-36-667 = (S0ABC|S9DFG|S9QWE|QA45P))
disclaimer: above is all made up and I don't work at any of relevant companies

Comment by nnevatie 1 day ago

Do you think Intel names things poorly?

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

Comment by PunchyHamster 1 day ago

less worse.

It would be like having Quadro 6000 and 6050 be completely different generation

Comment by black3r 22 hours ago

There are GPUs from 3 different generations in that list... Quadro 6000 is an old Fermi from 2010, Quadro RTX6000 is Turing from 2018, RTX6000 Ada is Ada from 2022...

Oh and there's also RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell which is Blackwell from 2025...

Comment by jerf 14 hours ago

I gave up understanding GPU names a long time ago. Now I just hope the efficient market hypothesis is at least moderately effective and as long as I buy from a reputable retailer the price is at least mostly reflective of performance.

They've hyperoptimized all these marketing buzzwords to the point that I'm basically forced into the moral equivalent of buying GPU by the pound because I have no idea what these marketers are trying to tell me anymore. The only stat I really pay attention to is VRAM size.

(If you are one of those marketers, this really ought to give you something to think about. Unless obfuscation is the goal, which I definitely can not exclude based on your actions.)

Comment by masklinn 21 hours ago

The GeForce 700 series came in 3 different microarchitectures. Most were on Kepler but there were several fermi (the previous uarch) and a few mobile chips used maxwell (the following architecture).

Lest anyone think AMD is any better the Radeon 200 series came in everything from terascale 2 (4 years old at that point) to GCN3.

The gpu manufacturers have also engaged in incredible amounts of rebadging to pad their ranges, some cores first released on the GeForce 8000 series got rebadged all the way until the 300 series.

Comment by justsomehnguy 14 hours ago

MX440, my beloved.

Somewhat surprisingly it sometimes had a better performance than Radeon 9200 precisely because it lacked pixel shaders and yet had a good enough perf.

Comment by g947o 22 hours ago

Ah, I see who you are insinuating

Comment by yonatan8070 19 hours ago

Since everyone is complaining about the naming schemes of CPUs, I'll pitch in.

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.

Comment by the_pwner224 18 hours ago

And the 285H is lower performance than a 275HX.

Their laptop naming scheme at least is fairly straightforward once you figure it out.

U = Low-TDP, for thin & light devices

H = For higher-performance laptops, e.g. Dell XPS or midrange gaming laptops

HX = Basically the desktop parts stuffed into a laptop form factor, best perf but atrocious power usage even at idle. Only for gaming laptops that aren't meant to be used away from a desk.

And within each series, bigger number is better (or at least not worse - 275HX and 285HX are practically identical).

Comment by E39M5S62 14 hours ago

Don't forget the V series in there. I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 258V in my Thinkpad. I think they're still being made. I bought an open box Thinkpad T14s Gen 6 with it - they come with a nicer GPU than the Ultra 7 255U.

Comment by wtallis 10 hours ago

The V series is a one-off thing Intel did, but they don't have a direct successor planned.

Previously, they had a P series of mobile parts in between the U and H series (Alder Lake and Raptor Lake). Before that, they had a different naming scheme for the U series equivalents (Ice Lake and Tiger Lake). Before that, they had a Y series for even lower power than U series.

So they mix up their branding and segmentation strategy to some extent with almost every generation, but the broad strokes of their segmentation have been reasonably consistent over the past decade.

Comment by E39M5S62 9 hours ago

Very interesting. I was a bit out of the loop on Intel mobile CPUs; I looked up the benchmark specs for it when purchasing and saw that it generally trounces the 255U.

I've been really quite happy with it - most of the time the CPU runs at about 30 deg C, so the fan is entirely off. General workloads (KDE, Vivaldi, Thunderbird, Konsole) puts it at about 5.5 watts of power draw.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by MadameMinty 1 day ago

That reminds me when I got a server-grade Xeon E5472 (LGA771) and after some very minor tinkering (knife, sticker mod) fit it into a cheap consumer-grade LGA775 socket. Same microarchitecture, power delivery class, all that.

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.

Comment by shortercode 23 hours ago

I recall standing in CEX one day perusing the cabinet of random electronics ( as you do ) and wondering why the Intel CPUs were so cheap compared to the AMD ones. I eventually concluded that the cross generation compatibility of zen cpus meant they had a better resale value. Whereas if you experienced the more common mobo failure with an Intel chip you were likely looking at replacing both.

Comment by 7bees 1 day ago

It has pretty much always been the case that you need to make sure the motherboard supports the specific chip you want to use, and that you can't rely on just the physical socket as an indicator of compatibility (true for AMD as well). For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips. OEM stuff like this can be more of a crapshoot.

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.

Comment by duskwuff 1 day ago

> All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets.

That's an industry-wide standard across all IC manufacturing - Intel doesn't really get to take credit for it.

Comment by tristor 16 hours ago

> For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips.

Ah, but if you want to buy a newly released CPU and the board does support/work with it, but nobody has updated the documentation on the website: How do you know?

Ultimately it's always a crapshoot. Some manufacturers don't even provide release notes with their BIOS updates...

Back in the day, this is what forums were for. Unfortunately forums are dead, Facebook is useless, and Google search sucks now. So you should just buy it, if it doesn't work ask for a refund and if they refuse just do a chargeback.

Comment by kwanbix 1 day ago

I don't know why, but most tech companies are horrible at naming products.

Comment by sph 14 hours ago

It's because naming products is done by the marketing dept. Sometimes they decide to increase a "major" version number for a product that is a rehash of a previous line just to confuse people and sell more units.

People believe "bigger number" = better, and marketing teams exploit that.

Comment by thisislife2 21 hours ago

At least with CPUs, I believe the the retail product names are deliberately confusing by design so that you as a consumer get confused (and mislead) into buying older models, whose sales tend to stagnate when newer models are released. (Newer models are of course, obscenely priced to differentiate them). A somewhat aware tech consumer what like to buy the latest affordable model they can. But if you can't easily identify the latest model or the next best one after it, they will often end up purchasing some older model with similar name.

Comment by ssl-3 6 hours ago

That kind of deliberate ambiguity also backfires, though.

"My computer is too slow. I know it's an i9 -- whatever that means. But all these new ones are also i9s. You'd think they'd have something newer than that in the past 5 years. Oh well. I guess I can't get something better than what I have, so I'll just have to wait until something better comes along."

This results not in moving old products out of warehouses, but instead in moving zero products at all.

Comment by agos 1 day ago

you know, there are two hard problems in computer science...

Comment by mcny 1 day ago

For today's lucky ten thousand, the joke is that

> There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, off-by-one errors.

Comment by tmtvl 21 hours ago

I thought there were 3 difficult problems: naming things, cache invalidation, , and off by one errors. concurrency

Comment by chamomeal 19 hours ago

the concurrency twist got a laugh out of me, I've seen this joke a zillion times but never the concurrency bit

Comment by baklazan 1 day ago

Why do people say that, when the number one hardest problem is making good abstractions?

Comment by latexr 22 hours ago

Because it’s a “famous” (in our circles) quote. You might prefer this one:

> There’s two hard problems in computer science: We only have one joke and it's not funny.

Comment by myrmidon 22 hours ago

There are at least one more joke:

"There is 10 kinds of people, those who can read binary and those who can't."

Personally I prefer the cache invalidation one.

Comment by latexr 20 hours ago

> "There is 10 kinds of people, those who can read binary and those who can't."

I like the continuation (which requires knowledge of the original): “And those who didn’t expect this joke to be in base 3”.

Comment by ncruces 23 hours ago

Names abstract things.

Comment by latexr 22 hours ago

You explained one thing but introduced another needing explanation.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Comment by knorker 1 day ago

This is too forgiving of intel in this case. It has a name. They just don't use it. "Sockets Supported: FCLGA2011". It's not like this is poorly named. It's not even true.

Comment by D13Fd 18 hours ago

I agree their name scheme sucks. But the way to buy a new CPU is to check with the motherboard vendor about what CPUs the motherboard supports. You can't expect it to work (although it may) if the motherboard maker doesn't list it as supported.

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.

Comment by mrandish 13 hours ago

Because I don't follow CPUs constantly and only check in from time to time, all the code names (for cores, CPUs and platforms), generations, marketing names, model numbers, etc make it hopelessly confusing. And it's not just Intel but AMD and other companies have been doing this chronically for >10 years. It seems almost like intentional obfuscation yet I can't really think of a long-term reason that creating confusion systemically is in the company's interest. Sure, every company occasionally has a certain generation they might like to forget but that's too unpredictable to be the motivation behind such a consistent long-term pattern.

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.

Comment by kccqzy 12 hours ago

Tech journalism should help. It’s basically curation. I also don’t follow CPUs constantly. When I need to buy CPUs, I go to a few publications (say Ars Technica), search their archives for discussions of CPUs published within the last two years and see what the editors think.

Of course it’s only a solution if you are buying. If you writing low-level software for these outside userspace, I suppose you’ll have to follow the development of CPUs.

Comment by monster_truck 1 day ago

LGA2011 was an especially cursed era of processors and motherboards.

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.

Comment by ryukoposting 19 hours ago

Oh don't worry, the horrors are returning! https://www.techpowerup.com/343672/asrock-h610m-combo-mother...

Comment by lachiflippi 1 day ago

>and allowed you to increase the multipliers on non-K processors

Wasn't this the other way around, allowing you to increase multipliers on K processors on the lower end chipsets? Or was both possible at some point? I remember getting baited into buying an H87 board that could overclock a 4670K until a bios update removed the functionality completely.

Comment by kasabali 13 hours ago

Should be so, multiplier is locked at cpu level not firmware.

Comment by pkphilip 20 hours ago

Intel and AMD naming schemes are extremely confusing these days. I can understand that naming these things must be really complicated these days since we have different core counts, thread counts, different types of cores, different clock speeds etc, but still

Comment by deathanatos 1 day ago

This reminds me of my ASRock motherboard, though this was over a decade ago now. The actual board was one piece of hardware, but the manual it shipped with was for a different piece of hardware. Very similar, but not identical (and worse, not identical where I needed them to be, which, naturally, is both the only reason I noticed and how these things get noticed…), but yet both manual and motherboard had the same model number. ASRock themselves appeared utterly unaware that they had two separate models wandering around bearing the same name, even after it was pointed out to them.

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.

Comment by Yizahi 23 hours ago

Yeah, Intel has some crazies in the naming department since they abandoned Netburst with clear generation number and frequency in the name. I remember having two CPUs with exact same name E6300 for the exact same socket LGA775, but the difference was 1 GHz and cache size. Like, ok, I can understand that they were close enough, but at least add something to the model number to distinguish them.

Comment by Suggger 22 hours ago

It's fascinating how 'Naming Schemes' are supposed to clarify hierarchy but end up creating more chaos. When the signifier (FCLGA2011) detaches from the signified (physical compatibility), the system is officially broken. Feels like a hardware version of a bureaucratic loop.

Comment by vladde 19 hours ago

at least they are not renaming retroactively.

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

Comment by Corrado 19 hours ago

AWS just renamed their Security Hub service to Security Hub CSPM and then created a new service named Security Hub that is related but completely different than the original service.

Comment by kjs3 18 hours ago

And there's AWS S3, and there's AWS Glacier. And there's AWS S3, Glacier storage tier, which isn't Glacier. Which is OK, because Glacier is going away, and you should use S3, Glacier tier. Unless you're already using it, in which case you can still use it. So you still have to know Glacier and Glacier, while both storing your data, aren't technically the same thing.

But if you think that's bad, you haven't seen the name change shenanigans Microsoft pulls in Azure.

Comment by ocdtrekkie 1 day ago

In fairness, the author should've known something was up when they thought they could put a multiple year newer chip in an Intel board. That sort of cross-generational compatibility may exist in AMD land but never in Intel.

Comment by mort96 1 day ago

I mean sure, that would seem suspicious. But not suspicious enough that I'd likely have caught the problem. It's not that far fetched that Intel may occasionally make new CPUs for older sockets, and when Intel's documentation for the motherboard says "uses socket FCLGA2011" and Intel's documentation for the CPU says "uses socket FCLGA2011", I too would have assumed that they use the same socket.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by justinclift 23 hours ago

The author would likely be able to put a v3 generation processor in the motherboard, they just didn't do the necessary research to find that out before pulling the trigger.

Comment by userbinator 1 day ago

It sounds like you've never heard of Socket 370 or Slot 1.

Comment by justsomehnguy 22 hours ago

It sound like you've successfully inserted Tualeron into BP6 and it worked out of the box.

Comment by justsomehnguy 11 hours ago

me: looks at the updoots

me: mueheheh

Comment by tomcam 1 day ago

How dare they accuse Intel of any kind of naming scheme at all. Everyone who’s anyone knows it’s an act of stochastic terrorism.

Comment by baden1927 15 hours ago

Cross-socket E7-8890 v4/Socket LGA2011-1 GPU/CPU extensions for Blackwell 100.

Comment by m463 11 hours ago

I wonder if the AMD am4 and am5 stuff has issues like this?

Comment by kosolam 1 day ago

Wow $15 for that CPU sounds great.

Comment by titaniumtown 23 hours ago

Yea, old server hardware can be super cheap! In my opinion though, the core counts are misleading. Those 24 cores are not compareable to the cores of today. Plus IPC+power usage are wildly different. YMMV on if those tradeoffs are worth it.

Comment by cyral 15 hours ago

Wild that it was released in 2016 for almost $9,000

Comment by mlsu 14 hours ago

Until you see your electricity bill.

Comment by valexiev 1 day ago

Sounds like a great candidate for a Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by johng 1 day ago

This isn't that bad if you compare it to the USB naming fiasco... but yeah, definitely a problem in the tech industry for a long time.

Comment by sofixa 1 day ago

Not really comparable.

With Intel's confusing socket naming, you can buy a CPU that doesn't fit the socket.

With USB, the physical connection is very clearly the first part of the name. You cannot get it wrong. Yeah, the names aren't the most logical or consistent, but USB C or A or Micro USB all mean specific things and are clearly visibly different. The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work.

Comment by Arrowmaster 1 day ago

I don't think the port names is what they were referring to.

The actual names for each data transfer level are an absolute mess.

1.x has Low Speed and Full Speed 2.0 added High Speed 3.0 is SuperSpeed (yes no space this time) 3.1 renamed 3.0 to 3.1 Gen 1 and added SuperSpeedPlus 3.2 bumped the 3.1 version numbers again and renamed all the SuperSpeeds to SuperSpeed USB xxGbps And finally they renamed them again removing the SuperSpeed and making them just USB xxGbps

USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't"

Comment by zx8080 1 day ago

> USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't"

While not disagreeing, I'd ask for a proof it's not a marketing department's fun. Just to be sure.

Engineers love consistency. Marketing is on the opposite side of this spectra.

Comment by PunchyHamster 1 day ago

> USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't"

Engineers don't make names that are nice for marketing team.

But they absolutely do make consistent ones. The engineer wouldn't name it superspeed, the engineer would encode the speed in the name

Comment by GuB-42 16 hours ago

It will always work if you want 500 mA at 5V and if 480 Mbps is sufficient (assuming everything is USB2 compatible nowadays).

But sometimes the extra power or extra data transfer is not an option. For charging a laptop for instance, you typically need 20V, if your charger doesn't support that, you can't charge at all. And then there is Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, Oculink, where the devices that use these features won't work at all in an incompatible port. And I am not aware of device that strictly requires one of the many flavors of USB 3 or 4, but I can imagine a video capture card needing that. Raw video requires a lot of bandwidth.

Comment by numpad0 19 hours ago

Users aren't supposed to be (choosing && swapping) CPUs by themselves between these identical sockets(LGA2011 v0 through v3). These are supposed to be bought in trays and kitted in a shop. So reusing same parts for cost saving should not cause issues.

Consumer oriented sockets(LGA115x) has different notches and pin counts to prevent this issue - actually, some of "different" sockets in consumer oriented sockets with "different" chipsets are actually identical, and sometimes you see Chinese bastardized boards that use discarded server-marked chips and pins-fudged hacker builds online that should not be possible according to marketing materials, so there is their own rabbit hole there.

Comment by halapro 1 day ago

> But it will always work

Not at all. If you want to charge your phone, it might "always work", but if you want to use your monitor with USB hub and pass power to your MacBook, you're gonna have a hard time.

Comment by nativeit 1 day ago

Look for the USB hub that costs several times more than the rest, and that’s the correct one for your use case.

Comment by halapro 21 hours ago

You're missing the point. Of course "the most expensive one" will cover it, but price alone should not be a differentiator.

Comment by dataflow 1 day ago

> The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work.

I don't know what "always work" means here but I feel like I've had USB cables that transmit zero data because they're only for power, as well as ones that don't charge the device at all when the device expects more power than it can provide. The only thing I haven't seen is cables that transmit zero data on some devices but nonzero data on others.

Comment by dtech 1 day ago

I don't think those cables are in spec, and there are a lot of faulty devices and chargers that don't conform to the spec creating these kinds of problem (e.g. Nintendo Switch 1). This is especially a problem with USB C.

You can maybe blame USB consortium for creating a hard spec, but usually it's just people saving $0.0001 on the BOM by omitting a resistor.

Comment by nottorp 1 day ago

> the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal

How polite. It can be useless, not "not optimal". Especially since usb-c can burn you on a combination of power and speed, not only speed.

Comment by LoganDark 1 day ago

> But it will always work.

I can't find a USB-C PD adapter for a laptop that uses less than 100W. As a result, I can't charge a 65W laptop from a 65W port because the adapter doesn't even work unless the port is at least 100W.

It does not always work.

Comment by zx8080 1 day ago

I've noticed that GAN PD's 100w and 65w adapters output is actually less (both do not charge my laptop) than lenovo 65w charger (the one with a non-detachable usbc cable). Cable does not matter, tried with many of them including ones providing power from other chargers.

It seems totally random, and you cannot rely on watts anymore.

Comment by malfist 1 day ago

There's a fair number of misleading our outright wrong specs if your buying from amazon or the like. And even if you're buying brand name, the specs can be misleading. They often refer to the maximum output of all the ports, not the maximum output of a port.

So a 100 watt GAN charger might be able to deliver only 65 watts from it's main "laptop" port, but it has two other ports that can do 25 and 10 watts each. Still 100 watts in total, but your laptop will never get it's 100 watts.

Not every brand is as transparent about this, sometimes it's only visible in product marketing images instead of real specs. Real shady.

Comment by SEMW 23 hours ago

> Cable does not matter, tried with many of them including ones providing power from other chargers.

That might not necessarily be the right conclusion. My understanding is: almost all USB-C power cables you will enounter day to day support a max current of at most 3A (the most that a cable can signal support for without an emarker). That means that, technically, the highest power USB-PD profile they support is 60W (3A at 20V), and the charger should detect that and not offer the 65W profile, which requires 3.25A.

Maybe some chargers ignore that and offer it anyway, since 3.25A isn't that much more than 3A. For ones that don't and degrade to offering 60W, if a laptop strictly wants 65W, it won't charge off of them.

So it's worth acquiring a cable that specifically supports 5A to try, which is needed for every profile above 60W (and such a cable should support all profiles up to the 240W one, which is 5A*48V).

(I might be mistaken about some of that, it's just what I cobbled together while trying to figure out what chargers work with my extremely-picky-about-power lenovo x1e)

Comment by unsnap_biceps 1 day ago

I have a dell laptop that uses a usbc port to charge, but doesn't actually use the PD specification, but a custom one, so my 65w GAN charger falls back to 5v 0.5a and isn't useful at all. I'd bet dollars to donuts that your Lenovo is doing similar shit.

Comment by zx8080 23 hours ago

No. It can charge from my monitor PD just fine.

And wow, I'll keep away from Dell, thanks.

Comment by seszett 1 day ago

For this specific issue I'm surprised, I have used all kinds of USB PD chargers for my laptops and all of them but one are less than 100W, with no problem at all.

The ones I use most are 20W and 40W, just stuff I ordered from AliExpress (Baseus brand I think).

Comment by decryption 11 hours ago

I have been stung by the exact same socket name bullshit from Intel and it is infuriating.

Comment by PaulHoule 21 hours ago

They have to make “shit creek” to put a end to all those water bodies.

Comment by cindyllm 20 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by XCabbage 1 day ago

How did the title end up wrong on HN (schemes vs scenes) and what's the mechanism to get a mod to fix it?

Comment by rob74 1 day ago

I assume someone typed it in (possibly on a mobile device with autocorrect) rather than copy & pasting it (which you would have to do twice, for the URL and for the title).

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h 1 day ago

> and what's the mechanism to get a mod to fix it?

Email them, address is in the guidelines.

Comment by tlb 1 day ago

Fixed, thanks

Comment by Rakshath_1 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by arein3 1 day ago

well if you buy Intel you should expect incompatible sockets at any step, so that's on you

on the other side AMD with legendary AM4