About the scheme

Software engineering conventions applied to silicon.

Why

Intel named its processors 4004, 8008, 8080, 8086, 80186, 80286 and 80386, then Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium 4. Then came Core i3/i5/i7/i9 with the generation hidden in the first digits of the model number, then Core Ultra Series 1 and 2. Manufacturing processes went from "10nm SuperFin" to "Intel 7", "Intel 4" and "Intel 18A", counting down. SIMD went from MMX to SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, AVX-512 and AVX10.

This project renames all of them with one rule set, borrowed from Git, GitHub, semantic versioning and dependency graphs.

Anatomy of a name

Intel CPU v13.3.8-K

  • Organization: Intel, or TSMC for the processes Intel buys from it.
  • Component (a repository): a product line such as CPU, Mobile CPU, Server CPU, Lithography or SIMD.
  • Major: the generation. A mostly superior successor bumps it.
  • Minor: the performance class inside a generation (Celeron < Pentium < i3 < i5 < i7 < i9), or the revision of a process or ISA family.
  • Patch: the model inside a class, ordered by model number.
  • Suffix: the SKU letters (K, F, T, H, U, …). Variants share the version.

Rules

  • Numbers only ever go up by one. There are no gaps, so the 5th Core generation is not v5: the 4004, 8086, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, P6, NetBurst and Core 2 eras come first.
  • Versions are computed, not stored. If a forgotten product is added, everything after it is renumbered when the data is regenerated.
  • The first release of a component is v0.0.1, never v0.0.0. For example Intel CPU v0.0.1 is the 4004 and Intel CPU v0.1.0 is the 8008.
  • Components depend on other components. A CPU uses a lithography process and SIMD extensions, e.g. Intel CPU v13.3.8-K uses Intel Lithography v14.0.0 and Intel SIMD v2.0.0.
  • Each version has a changelog against the previous patch, the previous minor and the same class of the previous major. It lists breaking changes (socket, memory, removed instructions), fixed and introduced vulnerabilities, dependency changes, features and specs.

Benchmarks

CPUs are scored in single-thread, multi-thread, 3D rendering and gaming performance, and get a total that also counts the recommended price. Every score is out of 10,000: results are normalized to the best CPU on every benchmark and adjusted by z-scores across CPUs and within each CPU. See the benchmark ranking for details.

Components

  • Intel CPU: Desktop client processors, from the 4004 to Core Ultra.
  • Intel Mobile CPU: Laptop processors built on big (Core-class) cores.
  • Intel HEDT CPU: High-end desktop processors (Core X-series and Extreme Editions on server-derived platforms).
  • Intel Embedded CPU: Embedded and IoT variants of big-core client processors.
  • Intel Low-power CPU: Processors built on Atom-class small cores (Atom, Celeron/Pentium N and J, Intel Processor N).
  • Intel Server CPU: Xeon server and workstation processors.
  • Intel Manycore CPU: Xeon Phi manycore processors and coprocessors.
  • Intel IA-64 CPU: Itanium processors (IA-64 architecture).
  • Intel Microcontroller: Quark microcontrollers and SoCs.
  • Intel Lithography: Intel manufacturing processes. Major = full node, minor = enhanced revision of that node.
  • Intel SIMD: Vector instruction set extensions. Major = ISA family (MMX, SSE, AVX, ...), minor = generation of that family.
  • TSMC Lithography: TSMC manufacturing processes used by Intel products.

Data sources

ARK data is a 2023 snapshot. Older and newer products are curated by hand and cover the main SKUs only. Vulnerabilities are matched by codename and are approximate. Generated 2026-11-01.