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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Taking a page from automobile marketers, Intel Corp. will now assign model numbers to its chips and eliminate measurements of raw speed from its product names, the world's largest chip maker said on Friday.

The move marks a break from decades of chip marketing strategy, and comes at a time when Intel is trying to pack into its chips more features, such as security and multi-tasking, that fall outside what has long been the primary measurement of raw speed -- the number of megahertz or gigahertz.

The shift, one analyst said, will better position Intel's newest notebook computer chip, the Pentium M, which has lower "clock speeds" than other Intel mobile chips. But the new marketing strategy could also confuse computer shoppers used to treating chip speed as the only marker of performance.

"It is confusing, and it's going to take a tremendous amount of education on the part of Intel and Intel's customers for this to sort of get assimilated into the marketplace," said Nathan Brookwood, who runs the research firm Insight 64.

Intel's new model numbers give each Intel processor brand a series number. Within desktop computer chips, for instance, the low-end Celeron chip will be given the 300 series, the high-end Pentium 4 will be given the 500 series label, and its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will be given the 700 series.

Within each series, a higher number -- a 350 series versus a 330 series, for example -- will signify a broader array of features in the chip.

While chip speed will no longer be included in the chip's name, Intel is not eliminating chip speed from the description, and said personal computer makers are unlikely to strike speed from their own advertising.

Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. got rid of clock speed from its chip names two-and-a-half years ago, replacing it with another number that it said better signified the chip's overall performance.

At the time, it was widely viewed as a way for AMD to address the issue of its chips running at slower speeds than rival Intel's.

An AMD marketing executive suggested Intel's model numbers were arbitrary figures that said nothing about the chip's underlying performance.

"We have a system that we go by: it's not arbitrary," said Patrick Moorhead, AMD's vice president of corporate marketing. "We don't try to hide what we're doing."

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