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Comment by user-the-name | Hacker News Reader

Why did ARM have to abandon their nice, clean numbering system of basically just increasing the number in each family by one, and go for just completely random meaningless numbers that jump by an order of magnitude for no reason... Such a waste of a clean and understandable lineup.

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This is explained in the article:

> The new CPU family marks one of the largest architectural jumps we’ve had in years, as the company is now baselining all three new CPU IPs on Armv9.0.

I believe the deprecation of AArch32 is quite an important change and by itself already warrants issuing a new major version (then there's all mandatory extensions from v8.2+ and SVE2).

They have not claimed to bump the major version on a regular basis from now as you seem to suggest.

That's a reasonable perspective to take. But the A710 still supports AArch32. And they were really close to a traditional re-vamp point anyways =P. This release (of the middle core) would have been then A79. The next release (the one that would actually deprecate AAarch32) would have been A80... and doing weird shit when you reach "10" would just follow in the grand tradition of tech. I think really only Intels somehow just... kept counting up in a more or less sane way.

It'd be interesting to know the thought process behind their terrible naming convention. From the outside, it looks like they went out of their way to making it as confusing as possible.

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