Intel to designate Kaby Lake Pentiums as ‘Pentium Gold’

Intel brings together the Pentium G processors of the Kaby Lake generation under the name Pentium Gold. The company seems to want to distinguish it with the upcoming Gemini Lake-Pentiums, which will probably go through life as Silver.

The name change is apparent from a Product Change Notification, which Intel is sending to its partner companies. The document describes that the packaging of the Pentium G4560, G4600 and G4620, three dual-cores with HyperThreading of the Kaby Lake generation, must henceforth be provided with a logo that reads ‘Pentium Gold’.

The change suggests that Pentium Silver models will also appear, and there is indeed evidence of that. At the beginning of this month, details appeared about a Pentium N5000, which was classified as Silver. This is a Gemini Lake generation notebook soc. Gemini Lake is the successor to Apollo Lake and socs of this platform are intended for budget systems. Gemini Lake should be a bit faster than Apollo Lake, with Goldmont Plus cores and 4MB instead of 2MB cache, but the generation remains based on the frugal Atom platform. Silver must then make it clear that these Pentiums are less powerful than the Gold models.

Intel uses a similar naming scheme for its Xeon processors for servers, with Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. It is not yet known whether Pentiums with other designations than Gold and Silver will appear.