Intel CPU Letters Explained

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so we've done a number of videos here on tech quickie explaining the alphabet soup that you have to slurp down in order to understand exactly what it is you're buying when you go shopping for electronics and perhaps no company has been more guilty of throwing seemingly random letters at product names than Intel so while it might not be too hard to understand the difference between a core i3 and a core i5 you know bigger number is better as a general rule if you've ever looked at a product page or a spec sheet for a laptop or even some desktops you've probably noticed that sometimes there are letters attached to the end of the CPU model numbers - what are those for well as it turns out these letters aren't just random characters that Intel threw in they actually have real meanings that tell you something about the processor unfortunately there are so many of them that it can feel like you're trying to crack the da vinci code just to figure out what your cpu was designed to do but fear not tech quickie is here to demystify what they all mean starting with the one you're probably most familiar with already k k means that a chips multiplier is unlocked meaning that it can be easily overclocked if you have a similarly enabled motherboard non K chips have very limited overclocking functionality so make sure you look for that k if you want to tweak your system by the way Intel doesn't talk about it as much but the K in HK CPUs that you occasionally see in high end laptops also means the same thing speaking of which let's move on to H then which officially stands for high-performance graphics and is used to designate Intel's higher-end offerings in the mobile segment that consume more power and here's another mobile specific one many of those higher power chips also have AQ on the end this is for odd core so that's why you'll often see HQ on more expensive laptops it is not a subliminal message intended to make you think that Intel notebooks are high quality or is it anyway the other letters that you're likely to see on mobile chips are you and why with you standing for ultra-low power and why meaning yeah extremely low power hmm why not e4 extremely oh that's right because II was used to designate chips that support ECC memory so for better or for worse you and why chips are what you'll see in laptops and other mobile devices where the focus is more on saving battery life than on performance with some Y Series CPUs having T DPS of under 5 watts now it bears noting that Intel has an M suffix to make it clear that a chip is mobile but currently it's only being used on Xeon chips for mobile workstations now let's kick things back over to desktop land we'll start with the letter T this feels like an episode of Sesame Street these processors still fit in a standard LGA Desktop socket but they are low power so you'll often see them in small form factor or all-in-one computers that are designed with smaller power supplies or less aggressive cooling other letters can indicate some interesting graphics options so if you see a chip with a p on the end this indicates a desktop processor without integrated graphics which can save you a few bucks if you're planning to use a discreet video card anyway while the newer G CPUs feature Radeon rx Vega graphics that are built in from none other than Intel's biggest rival AMD sorry excuse me I mean their total non competitor Radeon Technologies group which is a totally different company now of course we'd be remiss if we didn't give a quick shout out to R and C which we last saw on the now several generations old Broadway line to designate a soldered on CPU and then an unlocked Desktop CPU respectively I don't know what the point of see instead of K was but you know it doesn't matter it's over now let's finish this up then with the most dramatic letter of all X this indicates a very high end unlocked consumer CPU with the most course and the highest prices and it's currently sitting atop the pile in the core I nine 79 80 XE for Extreme Edition not to be confused with E for ECC memory like I mentioned earlier so in summary then maybe Intel could do a better job of making these things simpler and more consistent for consumers but at least to their credit someone over there recognized the problem and spearheaded the creation of this lengthy website to help people decipher their ever shifting meanings we're gonna have that link below so you can find the latest updates speaking of the latest updates if you're not all about getting the latest phone all the time you want to be able to repair your own devices and improve their longevity iFixit are the guys to help you out they're all about teaching people how to take stuff apart and fix their electronics and they're leading the charge in the electronics repair industry with their iconic blue and 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Channel: Techquickie

Views: 1,611,538

Keywords: intel, cpu, letters, model, numbers, core, low, power, ultra, extremely, unlocked, overclocking, ecc, memory, high, performance, graphics, igpu, quad, broadwell, extreme, edition, multiplier, mobile, vega, radeon, processor

Id: 4a9DBU4sROA

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018