...make it confusing for the general punter.

I mean really, when it was based on clockspeed you could at least see at a glance which chips were supposed to be faster than what. But it looks like CPUs are going the way of GPUs: Confusing and hard to compare.

For example, comparing the GF5200 with an ATI equivalant... the 9600? Or is that better, or worse, or what? It's very tricky to tell without opening the techspecs, looking at clock & bus speeds and checking the number of pipes it has.

Bleh. No wonder I bought a console...

"Chip 5" would be better than these stupid names. Boring marketing is better than confusing marketing.

Unfortunately clock speed doesn't even come close to telling you which chip will perform faster than another. The design of the chip is so complex that naming has become a real problem. I thought intel had nailed it with the first lot of Core 2 chips. The Letter and number told you which performed the best. Then they introduced Penryn and a whole new level of complexity and I gave up caring.

I see a few posts describing the problem of the name not clearly indicating how an i7 is better than a Core 2 or whever, but no solutions. So, how are consumers supposed to know that i7 is better than whatever they're upgrading from?

I'm sure some good tv commercials will let everyone know that i7 is newest, but that doesn't always mean 'better' (Vista is newer than XP, but...), and if an average consumer upgrading from a mid-range Core-something or even a high end (but 4+ years old) Pentium 4 HT can't tell whether the mid-range i7 is going to be faster, why should they part with their money?

The PPro was the first P6 and came with a new bus architecture, which it seems is still the same bus they used throughout the Pentium II, Pentium !!! (yeah they really named it that), Pentium 4, Pentium M, and various Core variants (and miscellaneous Celerons) and the Pentium Dual Core. The new design with quickpath (or whatever it is named now) will be a new bus, and hence could be considered the 7th generation of bus interface.

Core i7 does seem like an odd choice though.

I think intel should name all new chips M 4.

M stands for "Model" and 4 because of http://xkcd.com/221/ (I-triple-E can't be wrong).

To be honest, I couldn't give a monkey's what they name it, I just want to know when I can actually buy a chip and board - and a decent Zalman cooler as, despite billions spent on R&D they still can't develop a good cpu fan.

I won't even comment on the clowns at Nvidia. I mean, you spend £300 on speakers, £200 on a top end soundcard - and what do you get - drowned out by the 60dB turbine whine of the GPU coolers. Sheesh!