Tri-core or Tricore or TriCore(tm)

I do find it kind of funny when marketing names go bad in unexpected ways of collide in unexpected ways. There is this fairly old Infineon combined DSP/MCU core called TriCore (the name means it is both a RISC, a DSP, and an MCU). It was a nice name, easy to recognize, easy to pronounce, unlike the competition at the time. Today though, we are seeing multicore chips with three cores on the die. So what are these, if not tri-core chips, in analog with single- dual- quad- oct- etc.  And this makes it very necessary to use the hyphen. For example, the Freescale recent StarCore 8113 chip with three cores has its press release explicitly headed tri-core with an hyphen. I guess marketing would have liked the more visually pleasing tricore moniker along with dualcore, which looks fairly established.

Ah well, not to mention the fun Infineon will have if it launches a triple-core TriCore device. Maybe in a third generation TriCore 3? The power of three, indeed. TriTriTriCore possibly?

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