Intel to rebrand its Pentium and Celeron laptop chip lineups

Intel Corp. will rebrand its Pentium and Celeron lines of entry-level laptop processors next year, the company announced today.

The two processor lines will be offered under a new brand, Intel Processor, beginning in the first quarter of 2023. Intel said that the change is designed to simplify the purchasing experience for customers.

“Intel is committed to driving innovation to benefit users, and our entry-level processor families have been crucial for raising the PC standard across all price points,” said Josh Newman, the interim general manager of Intel’s Mobile Client Platforms division. “The new Intel Processor branding will simplify our offerings so users can focus on choosing the right processor for their needs.”

The Pentium and Celeron product lines include central processing units that are primarily designed for entry-level laptops. Both brands have been in use for more than two decades. The Pentium product line was launched in 1993 and the Celeron processor series made its debut five years later, in 1998.

The original Pentium chip featured 3.1 million transistors made using an 800-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip was the first CPU from Intel to feature a superscalar architecture, or an architecture that can carry out more than one computing instruction per clock cycle. It offered a 60 MHz clock rate, which is equivalent to approximately one hundredth the maximum speed of Intel’s current flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-12900KS.

In the years that followed its 1993 launch, the Pentium chip series became Intel’s flagship processor line for the PC market. Intel started selling its flagship processors under a different brand, Intel Core, in 2006 and refocused the Pentium series primarily on entry-level laptops.

The Celeron chip series is likewise designed for entry-level laptops. CPUs from the series are particularly widely used in Chromebooks, low-cost laptops powered by Google LLC’s Chrome OS operating system. According to research from International Data Corp., computer makers sold more than 37 million Chromebooks in 2021.

The Pentium and Celeron product lines include processors based on several different chip architectures. Many Celeron processors are based on Intel’s Atom architecture, which prioritized energy- and cost-efficiency over performance. The Pentium series, in turn, includes processors that use more advanced core designs.

The fastest Pentium chips, which are sold under the Pentium Gold name, use the same Alder Lake architecture that powers Intel’s flagship Intel Core processors. The Alder Lake architecture is based on the company’s latest 7-nanometer manufacturing process. Chips that use the architecture include two sets of cores, one of which is optimized for energy-efficiency while the other prioritizes performance.

Image: Intel