Intel has decided to shuffle its market segments and to add some more names and market segments to its already complicated portfolio.

Up till recently Intel had value, essential, mainstream, performance and the extreme market. In the past the value market included Atom, Celeron and Pentium products and as of last update Pentium moved to the legacy market segment.

Core i3 before was aligned as essential and as of recent update it is a transactional part of the segment. Core i5 got an upgrade from a mainstream to mainstream performance market of the market while Core i5 and i7 are now part of Premium Performance market, up from previous performance market segment.

Core i7 Extreme was part of the extreme segment on the market alignment roadmap and in the new roadmap it remained on the same market segment.

So now instead of value, essential, mainstream, performance and extreme market Intel has value, legacy, transactional, mainstream performance, premium performance and extreme market segment.

This market segmentation is likely to stick for a while, as the Sandy Bridge generation scheduled for early 2011 will simply update the current Core i3, i5 and i7 segmentation and it doesn’t look like Pentium and Celeron brands will be gone anytime soon.