There are a lot of CPUs available on the market, with all kinds of complex names that make it sound more like a military secret weapon. But, if you look closely at the nomenclature, you will find a remarkable similarity. It is pathetic that CPU manufacturers like Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. do not have clear documentation on their naming scheme. Instead, they take it for granted that everyone understands their cryptic names. So, this article will contain everything about CPU nomenclature, board compatibility, and more.
All the Major CPU Manufacturers Today
There are a bunch of CPU manufacturers in the market today. Intel has been there since everything started. Another American semiconductor company, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., commonly known as AMD, entered the race in the 1960s by making chips for Intel. But, if you follow the market these days, AMD is more popular than Intel, and the latter is losing market share to it at a high rate.
Apart from these major manufacturers, there are a few more players in the market. These include Cupertino-based tech-giant Apple, Inc., which makes chips for all of their devices ranging from laptops, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches. Apple chips are not sold loose for DIY systems, so you cannot pick one for your gaming system. Also, Mac OS lost its position as the platform for gamers back in the early 1970s, so you would like to stay away from their products if you are building a gaming machine.
Other than these, we have chip manufacturers Samsung, Qualcomm, and Mediatek. These companies mainly manufacture mobile chips that power the majority of smartphones and tablets these days. Just like Apple, their chips are not sold loose unless you are a manufacturer. Although it is possible to install Windows in these ARM-based chips, better not try that.
So, for the bottom line: there are two big manufacturers in the market today: Intel and AMD. If you want to build a gaming system, you will be looking at offerings from either company.
AMD: A Brief History
AMD has been in the CPU manufacturing history since the beginning of personal computing. In the beginning, they modified chips based on Intel’s x86 instruction set and sold them to the market at a huge profit margin to help the demand. Later, they developed their R&D unit and stopped modifying Intel chips.
Since 2000, AMD has gone through several ups and downs. Their Athlon lineup from the early 2000s was extremely popular among the then gamers, but the Phenom lineup brought their credibility down. The FX lineup, which also powered the PS4 and the Xbox One back in the day stood no chance in front of Intel -well processors, and AMD was almost nearing bankruptcy.
Recently, Dr. Lisa Su took over the role of CEO in the company. The company went through a complete reorganization, and their Zen lineup has become the market dominator in both price-to-performance ratios and features.
Intel: A Brief History
Intel pioneered the personal computing space alongside IBM back in the day. They are the biggest player when it comes to microprocessor market share, with over 75% of the systems rocking an Intel processor these days.
Intel has gone through several ups and downs just like AMD. Both of these companies keep fighting for the performance crown, and the users benefit from them. AMD pushed Intel to revive its aging dual and quad-core offerings back in the late 2000s. The result was the birth of the Core i3, i5, and i7 SKUs. Intel pushed AMD to bring more performance to their processors back in the early 2010s, and AMD pushed Intel to bring more cores to their processors and enable hyperthreading in all of their offerings back in 2019.
Recently, the performance battle has touched its limits with Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake processor launch in November 2021. The company has a rich history in the computing space, and it is near impossible to briefly summarise all of its achievements.
CPU Offerings from Intel
Both AMD and Intel offer CPUs that perform competitively. While the performance crown has kept shifting from one company to another, neither of their offerings can be shunned as “bad”. The current lineup of CPUs from both of the companies has quite an identical naming scheme, and that obliterates a lot of confusion. This wasn’t the thing earlier, and CPU naming could even have confused a NASA scientist.
The mainstream lineup from Intel is the Core lineup. Processors in this lineup are divided into Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 sub-brands. The higher the number after “Core i”, the better the performance. Apart from these processors, Intel also sells Celeron and Pentium processors. Neither of them is built for gaming. They are mainly targeted towards entry-level media PCs and enterprise solutions.
So, if you are looking to build a gaming system, you should be looking at either at the Core lineup. But, there are hundreds of processors even in the Core i5 or the Core i7 lineup. So, let’s break the nomenclature down.
Let’s take up one of Intel’s latest processors, the Intel Core i9-12900KF. Now, let’s break down its naming. The first name, “Intel”, is the name of the company. “Core” is the sub-brand, and i9 is the respective lineup. After that, 12 stands for the generation number. So, we can infer that the i9-12900KF belongs to the 12th generation “Alder Lake” lineup. If it was 11 in place of 12, we could have said it is from the 11th generation “Rocket Lake” lineup. If it was 9, we could have said it is from the 9th generation “Coffee Lake R” lineup, and so on.
The next number generally reaffirms the lineup once again. ‘9’ generally refers to a Core i9; ‘7’ and ‘8’ refers to a Core i7; ‘6’, ‘5’, and ‘4’ refer to a Core i5, and ‘3’ and ‘1’ refer to a Core i3. The following numbers will tell you whether it is an SKU or an OEM processor. “00” means that the processor is an SKU. “50”, “40”, “30” generally mean that is an OEM processor.
The following letters will tell you about overclocking support and iGPU availability. If there are no letters present, it is a locked CPU with an iGPU. If it just has an ‘F’, it is a locked processor with no iGPU. If it has just a ‘K’, it is an unlocked processor with an iGPU. If it has a ‘KF’, it is an unlocked processor with no iGPU. Generally locked processors are cheaper than their corresponding unlocked SKUs. Also, processors with no iGPU are consistently 20-30$ cheaper than their non-F counterparts.
In the case of our example, the processor is an unlocked i9-12900, with no iGPU in it.
That is all you would want to know about Intel CPUs. Respective performance would still vary from generation to generation. Part of it also depends on luck as something called silicon lottery exists,
Motherboard Support for Intel
Intel has four lineups of motherboards. These include the top-of-the-line Zx90 series, the Hx70 series, the Bx60 series, and the Hx10 series. The ‘x’ refers to the generation name where ‘6’ is meant 12th generation processors, ‘5’ is meant for 11th generation processors, ‘4’ is meant for 10th generation processors, and so on. The motherboard was refreshed with the launch of 6th generation Skylake processors, so, if you have a 5th gen or older processor, motherboard nomenclature for it is different.
This means a 12th generation processor could sit on a Z690, H670, B660, or H610 motherboard. The Z lineup is the best-of-the-best and is only meant for high-performance systems with complete overclocking support. The H670 platform is starved of a few features, like limited OC support, lesser bus lanes, and more. The B660 series is more feature-starved, including lesser memory channels, and the H610 lineup is the bottom-of-the-line offering with just the basic features.
The same formula applies to the 500, 400, and previous series as well. Intel maintains one socket for two successive generations. Like, the 8th gen and 9th gen processors were based on the same LGA1151 socket. The 10th and 11th gen were based on the same LGA1200 socket. The 12th generation processors are based on the LGA1700 socket, and hopefully, the 13th gen processors will be based on the same socket. So, boards made for say the 8th and 10th gen received support for 9th and 11th gen processors via a BIOS update after they were launched. So, you would be able to fit 9th gen processors on a B365 board, which was originally made for the 8th gen lineup.
CPU Offerings from AMD
Years after the wild west of CPU nomenclature ended, AMD CPUs are named very closely to Intel. So, Intel’s Core lineup can be considered equivalent to AMD’s Ryzen lineup, at least when it comes to nomenclature. Much like Intel, AMD also sells Ryzen 3, 5, 7, and 9 processors. Apart from that, they sell their Athlon lineup of processors for low-power media systems and enterprise solutions that do not require a lot of computing power.
Let’s take up two of AMD’s latest processors to understand their nomenclature, their Ryzen 9 5950X and the Ryzen 7 5700G.
Much like Intel, the Ryzen 9 is the top-of-the-line offering from the company. The number following the lineup name hints at the series number, which is the Ryzen 5000 in this case powered by Zen 3 cores. The same goes for the 5700G.
The next number refers to the lineup. Mostly ‘9’ refers to a Ryzen 9, ‘8’ and ‘’ refer to a Ryzen 7, ‘6’, ‘5’, ‘4’ refer to a Ryzen 5, and ‘3’, ‘2’, and ‘1’ refer to a Ryzen 3. The next numbers are mostly “00”. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 has a “50” in the end, a trend we are seeing from the Ryzen 3000 series.
The last letter does not tell much in the case of AMD processors. If a processor has no letter at the end, it has no iGPU, and it can be overclocked to match the performance of the ‘X’ variant of the same SKU. If it has an ‘X’ at the end, it is clocked higher than the non-’X’ variant and boasts significant overclocking capability. If the last letter is a ‘G’, it is an unlocked processor with graphics cores. AMD refers to these SOCs as Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).
Motherboard Support for AMD
AMD’s motherboard support is quite different as compared to Intel. All of the Ryzen processors since 2017 are based on the same AM4 socket. They have three lineups of motherboard southbridge chipsets: The Xx70 lineup, the Bx50 lineup, and the Ax20 lineup.
The x here refers to the corresponding Ryzen lineup. The Z570, B550, and A520 chipset-based motherboards were released for the latest Ryzen 5000 series. But, you can fit any Zen 2, Zen+, or Zen processor on these motherboards. Although any motherboard can run any processor, we do not recommend running anything higher than a Ryzen 5 3400G on an A320 or A520 board. Also, the B550 boards cannot properly handle the Ryzen 9 3950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5950X processors. So, choose your motherboard based on the processor you are rocking.
Conclusion
No proven test or benchmark will tell you whether a CPU is compatible with a motherboard. You need to know all of this stuff to figure it out. It is not as confusing as it used to be, but this nomenclature can still take some time to get used to. Once you get a hold of it, you can figure out compatibility issues at the first glance.