Kishan Jainandunsing
(February 2006)

On January 3, 2006 Intel unveiled its new corporate identity, ending the Andy Groove era of “Intel Inside”. The new identity “signifies the company’s evolution to a market-driving platform solutions company”, according to the company's press release beginning of this year. The company’s new logo inherits the look of the swirling “Intel Inside” logo and carries the tag line “Leap ahead”. It’s the first time the company has added a tag line to its corporate logo.

Intel is in essence extending the principles behind the Centrino campaign from product to corporate identity and is evolving the company from platform-CPU centric to platform-chipset centric. The chipsets target specific end-product categories, such as laptops, entertainment PCs, etc. The chipsets under the Centrino brand were the first such products, targeting mobile computing. The recently announced ViiV brand will be used for chipsets that target entertainment or media-center PCs for the living room.

The company is not entirely doing away with its processor-centric brands, yet. It has developed a new brand hierarchy with the new corporate logo at the top, followed by the platform brands, followed by the processor brands. All brand logos have been revamped to include the new corporate logo minus the tag line. The platform and processor brands have adopted the moniker “Duo” to signify the presence of Yonah-2 dual-core processor capabilities. Thus, a Centrino chipset with a dual core Yonah-2 processor is branded as “Centrino Duo”. Processors designed with the Yonah or Yonah-2 architecture carry the moniker “Core”. Thus, a single-core Yonah processor is branded Core Solo and a dual-core Yonah processor is branded Core Duo.