For several months the dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured hell-on-earth yarns claiming that Intel’s long-serving Core brand was due for an upgrade.

Intel’s director of global communications, Bernard Fernandes, took to Twitter this morning to confirm that the chip giant is preparing some chip branding changes for later this year.

The tweet talks about Intel being at an “inflexion point” ahead of launching its Meteor Lake architecture client CPUs later this year as it is developing something new for branding its first mass-scale chipset-based consumer CPU.

“Yes, we are making brand changes as we’re at an inflexion point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our #MeteorLake processors.

We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks,” he wrote [we removed the exclamation marks for the sake of reader sanity].

The current Core branding has been with us since 2008 with the launch of the generational Core family and the now familiar i3/i5/i7 tiers. Chipzilla added the i9 tier and played with suffixes a few times in the last 15 years, but Core branding has remained the same.

The rumours suggested that Core will lose its Core i-series branding for the new Core Ultra branding.