I haven't been able to keep those straight for years. Maybe this is just me getting old, but I miss the old days, when you could easily tell that a Pentium is faster than an 80486, and that a Pentium 133 is faster than a Pentium 100.

These days, CPU speed matters less than it did back then, but there still are CPU-hungry applications (I'm looking at you, Autodesk Inventor!), and if I had to put together a PC from scratch (which I think I'll actually sometime this year), I would be kind of lost.

Part of the issue here, I think, is that cpu's are much more complex than they were then. You have a number of different cpu lines with different models on the market at any time.

That is true.

But that does make the decision what CPU is best for a given use case and budget much more complex, too.

(Like I said, the impact of the CPU on overall system performance is less today than twenty years ago for many use cases, so it is not that much of a problem.)

Intel probably intentionally advertises with their weirdo socket names (1156 -> 1155 -> 1150 -> 1151) just to confuse people more. Heck, they probably choose the pin counts in such a strange order just to be more confusing. It's not like they have usable names (Socket H, H2, ...).

A long time ago Intel CPU core codenames were geographic features in or near Oregon.

I remember reading that they choose locations because their names aren't trademark-able. So if you try calling your product SuperCPU, then a competitor rushes to trademark the same name, they could force you to rename it, thus tactically interfere with your marketing plan. But if you call it "Chicago" they can't trademark it because its a place.