The short answer is that Intel knows what these things means, but does not publish a mapping anywhere of how these internal names correspond to external products. The closest Intel comes is this document at http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/mature/mature.pdf, which does not mention either Family or Stepping names.
In semiconductor fabrication, “stepping” refers to the chip manufacturing process which is called a stepper that deposits successive layers of etched material conducting material and insulation. Our best guess is that this is an internal reference to the plant/stepper technology that produced the chip.
The CPU configuration data in the Registry is actually a narrow subset of the information Intel places in WMI today. See for example, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394373.aspx for the complete win32_processor spec. See the table that documents the processor family. However, most of these fields are null when you query them in WMI, as in the following script, for example:
Set colSettings = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
(“SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor”)
For Each objProcessor in colSettings
Wscript.Echo “System Type: ” & objProcessor.Architecture
Wscript.Echo “Processor: ” & objProcessor.Description
Wscript.Echo “Family: ” & objProcessor.Family
Next
will return a Processor Description identical to what is contained Registry, but Processor.Family is null.
There is a a new field available for some of Intel’s newer processors at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEHARDWAREDESCRIPTIONSystemCentralProcessor�ProcessorNameString that may provide you with what you are looking for.
You can harvest this Registry value using the NTSMF Registry data collection feature. Add the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEHARDWAREDESCRIPTIONSystemCentralProcessor�ProcessorNameString field name to the Registry values on the DCS Parameters “File Contents” Tab, as in the following illustration:
to gather the information stored in this Registry field.
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