Intel recently announced this Tuesday, that its 7th generation of Pentium Kaby Lake processors will be rebranded as Pentium Gold. This affects the retail units of Intel Pentium G4560, G4620, G4600. The ideology is adapted from its nomenclature Xeon product-line up that have Bronze and Gold editions.
Pentium Kaby Lake processors will help consumers tell the MSDT (mainstream-desktop) Pentium processors from the ULP (ultra low-power) chips branded Pentium. This change will take effect from 2nd November, 2017.
Mainstream desktop CPUs will be rebranded as Pentium Gold where as the low-powered ‘Gemini Lake’ CPUs will remain the same. The rebranding isn’t supposed to change any physical elements of the processors and all the specifications and chipset compatibility will remain the same as before.
Pentium Kaby Lake processors will introduce a slightly modified box design and a refreshed case-badge but all the processors e.g. G4560 will carry identical feature-set. Even a Bios update will not be necessary.
Users have reflected some concerns on poor marketing, as compared to the performance standards of the Xeon or the Core i series of processors Pentiums are still slower. Users of different forums have mentioned that this rebranding as “Pentium Gold” is more likely to confuse a consumer who’s less aware in to buying this processor. With obvious anticipations of very high performance.
These rebranded Kaby Lake processors also suggest that Pentium Silver models might also be appearing soon, there’s an assumption that Pentium N50000 will be doing that.
The ultra low powered Gemini lake processors mostly end up being in notebooks and energy efficient laptops. While Intel recently did the same thing with Xeon processors with their Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze models, bifurcating each with different set of specifications.
But none of the less, it’s also the consumer’s responsibility to be aware and compare specifications, prices and vice versa before making such an investment decision.
