Intel rebrands again: meet Core i3 and Core i5

If you think it's hard to create whole market segments by dreaming up ways to differentiate your products from one another so that you can charge more for some of them, try being tasked with selling the resulting jumble to consumers. My heart bleeds for Intel marketing, but only just a tiny bit.

It's that time of year again, when Intel does its seemingly annual rebranding ritual in an effort to "simplify" and "clarify" its sprawling product line. This year's rebranding is significantly more comprehensive than last year's effort, and let's hope it's more successful.

Intel is keeping the "Intel Core" brand while adding two new "modifiers," i5 and i3, to signify one and two notches down respectively on the price/performance scale from Intel Core i7, which will remain at the top as a performance brand. In sum, you'll be able to buy what is essentially the same processor at three different performance and feature points, which are, from top to bottom: Intel Core i7, Intel Core i5, and Intel Core i3.The market is no longer simple, which means that Intel's product mix and brand strategy are no longer simple, but Intel is still addicted to enforced market segmentation.Intel is transitioning the "Centrino" brand from mobile platforms to wireless networking products. It's keeping the Pentium brand for very low-end platforms and Atom for mobile.The other big part of the rebranding is a new stars rating. Five-star processors will have the most performance and features, and one-star processor will have the least. This isn't such a great idea, because, who really wants to buy a "one-star" anything? By broad and deeply-ingrained cultural consensus, "one star" or "two stars" doesn't mean "this is slightly less awesome than the five-star option," it means "this is a turkey, so stay away."

If I were AMD, I'd be really happy to see Intel moving to this star-based scheme, because AMD's marketing team can adopt this and just start all of their own processors at the three-star level. At least, that's what I'd do.

Why Intel keeps rebranding

Intel doesn't even pretend that this latest rebranding is the last one, which is good, because it won't be. The market picture is vastly more complex than it was even just five years ago, and as Intel pushes its chips into new niches it will complexify even more.

Back in the "gigahertz race" era, market segmentation was done by clockspeed. Customers paid more for higher MHz and GHz ratings, because those ratings translated directly into performance. Intel profited from this arrangement by deliberately enforcing this clockspeed-based segmentation—the company would purposefully down-clock processors that could've been sold at higher speed ratings, in order to limit supply (and increase profit margins) at the top end.

Now that the clockspeed race is over, the core-count race has taken its place, but more cores do not necessarily equal more performance. (They only sometimes equal more performance, on certain workload types.) And, of course, power now matters as well, with performance per watt now having replaced raw performance as the ruling metric for the majority of the market.

So the market is no longer simple, which means that Intel's product mix and brand strategy are no longer simple, but Intel is still addicted to enforced market segmentation. This time, however, instead of down-clocking processors to limit the supply of top-end parts, the company disables features by blowing polysilicon fuses. So if you want vPro, you have to pay extra for a processor that comes with functioning vPro hardware; otherwise, you can pay less for one with vPro disabled. I personally don't like this scheme at all, but I'm also not the one tasked with maintaining high-enough margins to support the next round of multibillion-dollar fab building.

This segmentation strategy, in which Intel deliberately creates segments by tweaking features and clockspeeds (they still do the latter) on processors to slot them into a product matrix, is complex and hard to market, but it's also a problem of Intel's own making. So while Intel's marketing team has my sympathies as they try to package Intel's product matrix into a form that consumers can grasp, I don't feel that sorry for them, because they made their own bed