Most users use the products without knowing much beyond their technical characteristics, but few know the origin of brands and the many curiosities they contain. We will therefore review at least the registered trademarks better known and explain why they are called what they are called so that you can know their origins a little better.
The origin of the most popular CPU names
Let’s start by talking about processors Intel Pentium, probably the most famous brand of CPU because they are the ones who followed the famous 486, where Intel broke its nomenclature for the first time because in theory these processors should have been called 586.
Before the advent of this brand, Intel processors simply used a numeric code in their nomenclature, which was very common at the time. Thus, we had processors like the 8086, the 286, 386, 486…. and instead of 586 came the Pentium brand which is still in use today. This name comes from the Greek word “slope” which means “five” and the Latin ending -ium to form a neutral name. So, as you can see, Intel hasn’t quite “broken” with the 80×86 naming nomenclature.
We continue with Intel with its processors Celeron, which they also continue to use to this day. It is the low-cost version of the Pentium which bears the name of the Latin root “Celer” which means fast because at that time the operating speed of the processors started to skyrocket, and with the Celeron Intel had the “Throne” of the fastest processors of the moment.
Other Intel processors are Xeon, reserved for the professional environment but still used today. First introduced in June 1998, these processors were based on the same architecture as desktop processors but with more cores, more cache, ECC memory support and in greater numbers, more PCIe lanes and more. long etc. This is why the name Xeon comes to mean something like strength and reliability.
We are going to AMD with its famous processors Athlon, which they also continue to use even in this modern age. This brand is a name that comes from ancient Greek and means “prize, trophy, award” but also “contest, tournament, competition”, and as you can suppose, it is called that because when they were introduced , they expected to present strong competition to Intel (and win the “prize” for best processor, of course).
We continue with the processors Duron Yes Sempron of the brand, also registered names that have to do with its strength, durability and reliability. Although there is no completely concise explanation for the names of these processors, it seems that Duron comes from the Latin “durare on” or durable unit; For their part, the Sempron processors which were their successors, have a name that comes from the Latin “Semper”, always referring to their durability and reliability.
We continue with the names that AMD has given to its processors with the famous Name, whose sure name you can imagine comes from “phenomenon”, and that is that they really were a phenomenon when they first hit the market, especially for their excellent performance and overclocking potential.
We have registered the names used in modern processors, such as Heart Intel side and Ryzen in AMD. Regarding the Intel Core processors, the manufacturer has essentially limited itself to calling them after the nomenclature of its Core architecture without more, and they have no deep or significant meaning (worth the redundancy) beyond this. that they were introduced around the time when processors started having multiple cores, because Core means kernel in English.
The name Ryzen it’s something more complicated or deeper depending on how you want to see it. Obviously the suffix -zen refers to AMD’s Zen architecture, but what about RY-? AMD has never discussed the meaning of this name, but we can understand it in two different ways; -ry as a prefix can come from re, which means “again” or “again”, as if to say “we are back”, which Ryzen meant for AMD: the return to the market and the competitiveness with Intel. In English, RY can also be used as a suffix (not a prefix) which is a contraction of -ery, which in this case would come together to mean something like “the Zen saga”.
The code names of the processors
Codenames, codenames or “codenames” in English are used to name microarchitectures or generations of processors, basically. For example, we have seen names of cities (like Barcelona) or mountains, rivers, lakes, volcanoes or even things (like Bulldozer) in the case of AMD that seem to have no concrete meaning. For example, in the past AMD has used names like Palomino, Corvette, Rhea, Zeus, etc., but the only ones that really made sense were processors. Kryptonite of the brand (the AMD K5, K7, etc.), since they wanted it to be Intel’s “Kryptonite” (the famous element that weakens Superman).
As for Intel, we come back to the same thing, the code names of its generations like Sandy Bridge, Haswell or Rocket Lake have no intrinsic meaning beyond giving their architectures a proper name.
Works of art hidden in processors
Here we enter the realm of curiosities. Now it is rare to see something like this, but in the past what was called “Silicon art(Also known as chip graffiti or silicon doodling) which involved hiding artwork in chips, usually in frames near stamps. It’s an almost microscopic art that not many people know about but was quite fashionable at the time. For example, in the following image, you can see a buffalo created on an HP3582a IC chip.
This type of decorative art does not make much sense to users as it is something that cannot be seen with the naked eye, not to mention that it would be necessary to remove the IHS from the chip to be able to see it and then use a microscope, but not because it’s no longer a curiosity. These designs are engraved during the manufacturing process, that is, the lithographic machines themselves engrave them on the chips, so these “Easter eggs” come from the design of the chips themselves.
In the past, these Silicon Art made some sense since they were used as a kind of watermark to detect forgeries and copyright infringements (if the competition copied a chip, it could be used to obtain proof) , but since 1984 he entered The Semiconductor Chip. The Protection Art Act went into effect in the United States and it no longer makes sense. However, it’s still a sea of curious people, right?
