Pentium, Celeron may be dead for good as "Intel 300" 14th Gen dual core reportedly coming

In case you haven't been following Intel's entry-level processors for a while, the company announced last year that it is killing off its "Pentium" and "Celeron" brandings for its mobile chips. The move is in effect since 2023 as Intel does not feature any Pentium and Celeron SKUs for laptops and notebooks. However, the desktop lineup still features Pentium and Celeron named parts, at least up until the 12th gen Alder Lake series.

However, that could change soon too according to Twitter user and leaker chi11edog. The report suggests that Intel is reportedly working on new "Intel 300" branding in preparation for a dual-core processor. By dual core, the leak suggests that these will be two Performance cores (P-cores) with zero Efficiency cores (E-cores). The P-cores will have hyper-threading (SMT or simultaneous multi-threading) for a total of four threads. The P-core apparently has a base frequency of 3.9GHz within a 46W power envelope.

This means, the new naming aside, Intel will purportedly continue with its trend of not offering any E-cores on its entry-level desktop chips, something which is not true for its mobile parts. For example, while the Pentium Gold G7400 is 2P + 0E core part, the Pentium Gold G8500 mobile processor is based on 1P + 4E configuration.

Perhaps Intel feels like the hybrid design just isn't worth it for such low-core-count parts at least on desktops. Recently, some tests have shown that Intel's hybrid parts aren't as snappy and responsive as some of the older designs. Curiously, non-hybrid parts like this upcoming alleged Intel 300 CPU may actually be worse off under Windows 11.

Also, this isn't the only recent naming update done by Intel. The firm is also planning to introduce its new Core Ultra without the i for the 14th Gen mobile (Meteor Lake).