You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links. AMD has a similar site with similar functionality (except that AFAIK it won't let you easily get a list of products with a given uarch). These both have their faults, but I'd certainly pick them over an LLM.

But you're correct that for anything buried in the guts of CPUID, your life is pain. And Intel's product branding has been a disaster for years.

> You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links.

Intel removed most things older than SB late 2024 (a few xeons remain but afaik anything consumer was wiped with no warning). It’s virtually guaranteed that Intel will remove more stuff in the future.

Intel doesn't like to officially use codenames for products once they have shipped, but those codenames are used widely to delineate different families (even by them!), so they compromise with the awkward "products formerly x" wording. Have done for a long time.

I wouldn't mind them coming up with better codenames anyway. "Some lower-end SKUs branded as Raptor Lake are based on Alder Lake, with Golden Cove P-cores and Alder Lake-equivalent cache and memory configurations." How can anyone memorize this endless churn of lakes, coves and monts? They could've at least named them in the alphabetical order.

AMD does this subterfuge as well. Put Zen 2 cores from 2019 (!) in some new chip packaging and sell it as Ryzen 10 / 100. Suddenly these chips seem as fresh as Zen 5.

It's fraud, plain and simple.

The entire point of code names is that you can delay coming up with a marketing name. If the end user sees the code name then what is even the point? Using the code name in external communication is really really dumb. They need to decide if it should be printed on the box or if it's only for internal use, and don't do anything in between.

The problem, especially at Intel, but also at AMD, is that they sell very different CPUs under approximately identical names.

In a very distant past, AMD was publishing what the CPUID instruction will return for each CPU model that they were selling. Now this is no longer true, so you have to either buy a CPU to discover what it really is, or to hope that a charitable soul who has bought such a CPU will publish on the Internet the result.

Without having access to the CPUID information, the next best is to find on the Intel Ark site, whether the CPU model you see listed by some shop is described for instance as belonging to 'Products formerly Arrow Lake S", as that will at least identify the product microarchitecture.

This is still not foolproof, because the products listed as "formerly ..." may still be packaged in several variants and they may have various features disabled during production, so you can still have surprises when you test them for the first time.

It has pretty much always been the case that you need to make sure the motherboard supports the specific chip you want to use, and that you can't rely on just the physical socket as an indicator of compatibility (true for AMD as well). For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips. OEM stuff like this can be more of a crapshoot.

All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets. LGA to indicate it's land grid array (CPU has flat "lands" on it, pins are on the motherboard), 2011 because it has 2011 pins. FC because it's flip chip packaging.

> All things considered I actually kind of respect the relatively straightforward naming of this and several of Intel's other sockets.

That's an industry-wide standard across all IC manufacturing - Intel doesn't really get to take credit for it.

> For motherboards sold at retail the manufacturer's site will normally have a list, and they may provide some BIOS updates over time that extend compatibility to newer chips.

Ah, but if you want to buy a newly released CPU and the board does support/work with it, but nobody has updated the documentation on the website: How do you know?

Ultimately it's always a crapshoot. Some manufacturers don't even provide release notes with their BIOS updates...

Back in the day, this is what forums were for. Unfortunately forums are dead, Facebook is useless, and Google search sucks now. So you should just buy it, if it doesn't work ask for a refund and if they refuse just do a chargeback.