Intel in the MS school of “we have no idea how to name things.”
Yeah, I liked when the letter at the end indicated something about the TDP. No longer.
Odd numbers are just sexy, you know?
Really, though, computer hardware naming conventions have been wonky since the beginning. Oh, they usually start out with some logical concept, but then over time exceptions arise, marketing intervenes, and before you know it, you get Turbo buttons on everything.
Back in the day the names were intended to be useful, giving some indication as to real relative performance. Like when AMD did its “2400+” naming for example; they didn’t run at 2.4Ghz but they offered equivalent performance to Intel at that speed. Now there’s no real way to tell anything at all about the performance or power usage other than how far up the stack a given CPU is. This is deliberately opaque which is anti-consumer. To this day you can buy a brand new Ryzen 5 7235HS laptop and most people would have no clue it’s a 4 year old zen3 inside.
Oh, no doubt. But it’s always been the same slippery slope I think. PC, PC XT, PC AT, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II…not to mention the plethora of video card names that exploded in the period between straight-up VGA and the dominance of NVIDIA in 3D cards. It’s maybe even worse in the business/enterprise level stuff from what I’ve seen.
It’s not unique to computers though. Cars…now, there’s some real obfuscation through nomenclature and designation for your.