"News that AMD might revamp its processor numbering scheme was first suggested in December 2007."

It looks like, among its' other many powers, The Reg can see into the future as well...

So, what happened to common sense then? They initially cheesed me off by calling their chips things like 'Athlon XP 2000+ etc etc' - which only served to confuse the hell out of a lot of people because they never actually ran at 2GHz or whatever the number afterwards was - which is what the naming convention seemed to imply.

Now they come up with this nonsensical way to describe what chip your dropping into your machine. Idiots.

When the Athlon XPs were released, it made sense to use the marketing numbers, because the new core could compute more per clock, so if they sold them by GHz alone, people wouldn't be inclined to believe any speed increase. This was really all that they could do, and they kept it sane by giving the model number in terms of equivalent Thunderbird core clock speed.

Over time that has totally lost relevance, and now those number which look very similar are just marketing numbers. They might as well give some other numbers which can actually indicate the various different variety of chips which did not exist the last time they modified their naming scheme.

I'm not really a fan of confusing names, but with the complexity of CPU offerings out there, something has to be done to tell them apart easily. At least this is better than single core parts named "Core 2."

- Nex