Intel Xeon – the worse branding ever?

This is really frustrating if you didn’t knew. Intel likes to call many of their processors for “business class” systems “Xeon”. When they say Xeon it can mean anything from those dinosaurs based on Pentium II and the latest and greatest ones based on on Core i7. So when you see a system built with Xeon processor you really need to look up its exact subtle number and carefully study its specs to figure out what it really is.

For example, Xeon W3520 is same as latest Core i7-920, including the price. The only difference between two is Xeon supports ECC memory. So what’s the point in branding this processor as Xeon instead of Core 2 i7?

BTW, new Intel Core i7 series is definitely a winner and finally makes 2 year old Intel Core 2 series actually obsolete. This processor can execute 8 threads simultaneously and supports 3 channels for DDR3 access tripling the RAM bandwidth! Best of all, it costs more or less same as older Core 2 processors.