Earlier today Intel announced some non-news about officially revealing the branding of the Intel Core i5 and Core i3 processors – but with basically NO details on what was going to be what.  Well our good buddy Anand has fixed all that by showing us how the breakdown will be made.

Basically, the Core i7 brand will indicate a processor has 4 cores, 8 threads and will support Turbo Mode, Intel’s auto-overclocking feature.  Core i5 processors can be either 2 or 4 cores, support only 4 threads and will also support Turbo Mode.  Finally, the Core i3 parts will have 2 or 4 cores, support 4 threads of processing but will NOT have Turbo Mode enabled.  The only CPU that will be found in the LGA1366 socket will be Core i7 CPUs but you will find ALL of the above branded CPUs in the upcoming LGA1156 sockets.

Details of Intel Core i7, i5, i3 branding finally shown - Processors 2 
Let the confusion begin!

Wow, talk about getting confused!?!  You will have Lynnfield in both Core i7 and Core i5 brands.  Core i7 brands will apparently be differentiated by a model number: 8xx series parts will be LGA1156 Core i7s (Lynnfield) while 9xx series CPUs will be LGA1366 (Nehalem) based.  Decoder rings unite! 

Uh, okay, sure.  Head over to the Anandtech news article to see the details laid out in pretty tables and with information for the mobile variants.

The mobile i7 can be 2 or 4 cores and support 4 or 8 threads, which makes sense since there will be more dual-core than quad-core mobile processors. The rest of the lineup follows the desktop rules; i5 and i3 are capped at 4 threads and i3 doesn’t have Turbo.

I’ve got one more thing to report. Remember how I wasn’t totally sure about the turbo modes for the top end Lynnfield processor in our preview? I think I’ve got it: