Under the Wire: A fistful of processors

OPINION: What is it with the number five?

Has anyone else noticed that, in an industry where innovation and advancement are everyday necessities, microprocessor development seems to stop at five?

Bear with me while I explain. Back in the old days Intel chips were known by their numbers: 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486.

You knew an advancement had been made because the number in the middle changed, counting inexorably upwards as technological developments must.

Then, back around 1995 some time, the naming changed. As if a summit of sorts had been conquered, Intel started calling its flagchip the ‘Pentium’ rather than the more prosaic 80586 that we all expected. Fair enough, marketing is marketing. From there, the Pentium brand flourished: Pentium Pro, Pentium Plus, Pentium D. If it had a Pentium in it, you knew it was the latest thing. That’s good branding.

What mystifies me, though, is why it’s stopped there. Why is the same brand of microprocessor Intel put into PCs 10 years ago still in a laptop I can buy today?

The Pentium may have advanced – Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4 (note the abandonment of Roman numerals), Pentium M – but the brand hasn’t moved. They’re all still Pentiums.

Now, I don’t claim to know terribly much about the intricacies and finer points of microprocessor architecture. I don’t know if a Pentium 4 is as different from a 1995 Pentium as an 80486 was to a 1981 8086.

Probably is. But, from a pure branding perspective, I reckon the numbering looks a bit stale.
  
I’ll accept that “Sexium” would have been a no-no as computer brands were concerned, even with the mainstreaming of internet pornography. Likewise, “Septium” would have invited unwelcome satire of the, “Oh no, I’ve got a deviated septium” variety.

I’ll buy that Intel’s marketing geniuses had painted themselves into something of a corner Latin-wise. But by now we ought to be using Octiums, oughtn’t we? Why did we stop at five?

It’s not just an Intel problem, of course. Back in 1998, Apple started numbering the generations of PowerPC chip it was buying from Motorola and IBM, to simplify branding as much as anything else.

Rather than having to work out whether an IBM PowerPC 740 or PowerPC 750 was the better chip to suit your computing needs, you only had to know you were buying a G3 -- it was the third generation of PowerPC.

Likewise when Apple moved to Motorola’s PowerPC 7400/7500 family, users were never troubled with the intricacies of differences between the 7410, 7455 and 7470 (which I understand are quite different chips) -- they were all called G4.

And two years ago when Apple went back to IBM for PowerPC 9700- series chips they were conveniently re-named G5. There’s that number again. Five.

Will there be a G6? No. Apple’s going to be buying its next lot of chips from Intel, so IBM will be left to do the branding of its next-generation PowerPCs without Apple’s help.

Meanwhile at Intel, the chip king has announced a new generation of processors specifically designed with multimedia in mind. These new wonder-chips, built for the future, are called “ViiV” -- Intel’s marketing people clearly think that the number of words already in existence is simply inadequate. But hang on, ViiV isn’t a new word at all, really, because it’s pronounced so it rhymes with -- you guessed it -- five.

I have no doubt that the engineers who design microprocessors are exceedingly clever people, but frankly I get the impression they missed the more advanced episodes of Sesame Street. If they’d only pop over to their other hands, they’d discover a whole other set of fingers to count on.

figures hardware numbers processors