6 ms·

These big companies really need to get naming input from someone other than marketing teams. The second the 4080 and 4080 (not a typo) got announced, Nvidia was

These big companies really need to get naming input from someone other than marketing teams. The second the 4080 and 4080 (not a typo) got announced, Nvidia was shredded by the media. It was immediately and obviously clear to basically everyone that this was a bad naming system and only a bunch of navel gazers could have thought it was "good". I get that Engineers tend to be more practical in their names, and don't have the finesse that marketing is looking for. But at least some sanity checks would be good....

deleted 4y ago
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wongarsu 4y ago
Yeah, even if they had a good reason not to call one the 4070, the whole thing could still have been avoided by just calling them the 4085 and 4080. And the marketing people could probably have come up with something even cooler sounding, if somebody would have just stopped them from going with 4080 12GB and 4080 16GB.
- FractalParadigm 4y ago
  The funny thing is Nvidia already has 2 sub-part-numbers for better-than-the-xxx0-cards, without creating another line of xxx5 products. The 16GB could have been branded 4080 Ti or 4080 Super with the 12GB being the 'base' 4080.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    That was my thought... they should have just called it a "Super" still leaving room for a Ti model later. Or bring back GS designation after... 4080 and 4080 GS. They had lots of options to add distinction.
yamtaddle 4y ago
There was a golden age in the '00s when it was possible to get the gist of what Nvidia and ATI card names meant without consulting a very dense table. It was nice.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  It was amazing actually. Intel's marketing was so spectacular. Blue man group. Bunny suit commercials. Pentium, what a name. Intel Inside, those two words start an uninitiated jingle in my head. This is not looking through it with rose tinted glasses and nostalgia. It was objectively better, fun, straightforward and iconic. Not a single person knows what Intel's (or AMD, nVidia, Apple, etc.)'s advertisements after 2000's. Do you remember the last Apple ad? No. It is all generic, designer bullshit. All of it has gone to toilet. Marketing people have lost it across the board.
  - bigmattystyles 4y ago
    Oh please, AMD CPUs had lower clocks so to compete with Intel's (making up numbers to illustrate the point) 2.3Ghz where theirs was 2.1Ghz, they would call it Athlon 2300 or something to the effect. They may have had a point that their 2.1Ghz was as good as Intel's 2.3Ghz chip, but it's not been straightforward, probably, since a 286. (Edit, I meant to reply to the parent comment)
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      See Mac vs PC ads. Still memorable and impactful.
      - bigmattystyles 4y ago
        To be honest without looking it up, all I remember is stoner Steve. Dude, you’re getting a dell vs the Jeff goldblum mac ad that showcased pc cabling vs simple Mac. Still smile when I think of stoner Steve.
  - blagie 4y ago
    I agree. I think a deeper problem is it takes a Ph.D in Intel / AMD branding to understand what to buy. An 80486 was faster than an 80386, and 33MHz was slower than 66MHz. It was simple. Intel's i7 line-up goes from 2 to 16 cores, 1-4GHz, spanning 13 generations. Toss in i3/i5/i7/i9, and lines like Atom and Xeon. Each time I need to upgrade my computer, I groan. It's not just less fun, it's positively miserable. Most people I know either buy the cheapest possible computer, or an Apple. I don't know why Intel thinks anyone will spend extra if they have no idea what they're buying. Most non-Apple users I know have phones with faster processor, higher-resolution displays, and for higher prices than their laptops.
reaperducer 4y ago
These big companies really need to get naming input from someone other than marketing teams It's not the marketing teams to blame. Marketing teams name things iPod, or MacBook, or PlayDate. I don't know who names things at Intel, or Nvidia, or Sony, but it's not the marketing team. At least not a good one.
- rjmunro 4y ago
  Marketing teams name things 360, One, One S, One X, Series S and Series X. I think that's the right order, I'm not sure.
  - TillE 4y ago
    When the Xbox One was announced, people complained that it was confusing, but really it had been long enough since the original Xbox that the name was just silly, not confusing. The One/Series S/X crap is genuinely baffling, totally incomprehensible unless you've really been keeping up with every Xbox release. You can go on Wikipedia and figure it out in a few minutes, but...you should not have to do that.
    - monkpit 4y ago
      Don’t forget the OG offender in this category, the PSOne / PSX
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        In Sony's defense, everything else with the PlayStation was actually pretty straightforward. PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, and PS5. "PSOne" was a weird way to brand a slim console, but it's still obvious that it's a PS1. And while Sony did originally use PSX to refer to the PS1, that was an internal codename, i.e. "different from the Nintendo PlayStation[0]". The gaming press ran with it because people in that era insisted on awkward three-letter acronyms for all games consoles. Reusing it for a weird PS2 DVR combo unit is still way better than Microsoft launching two different consoles with the same name. [0] The cancelled SNES variant with the also-cancelled Super CD add-on built-in, both built by Sony.
sulcate 4y ago
But that's not the point. It's not meant to be intelligible. The point is marketing, aka to misinform consumers. It's working as expected and it happens in every field. Choosing obscure names that make it extremely hard to compare characteristics within products by a company, much less to compare to outside competitors, is not a bug --- it's a feature. Try buying a bike and figuring out how to compare it to other bikes by the same manufacturer from this year or last, or try to figure out what features it carries. You're left doing what you always do: staring at 7 tabs with spec sheets and slowly trying to absorb the features of the various "poorly" named offerings It's anti consumer and I'm surprised there's not more outrage, given that a market purportedly should consist of rational consumers making informed decisions.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  >given that a market purportedly should consist of rational consumers making informed decisions. And that misconception of humans by economists has had massive repercussions. No human is rational. We are emotion machines riding hormone waves. Fatigue, hunger, anger, arousal all affect our choices and can be gamed.
aprdm 4y ago
To their credit, they did roll it back
dinobones 4y ago
I'm still mad about CUDA cores. I thought I was going to be able to write some epic 1000x level parallelism running individually on all cores. It turns out, a CUDA core is not actually a "core."
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Why do they call it that then? I never really looked into it that much and just took as a measure of a certain type of compute capability ( FP16 or FP64 right? )
  - wmf 4y ago
    The SIMT architecture makes it look to the programmer like each FPU is a separate core, but all the cores in an SM have to run in lockstep to get good performance.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    They use that metric because it makes their marketing specs look nicer. Ultimately it's a count of the number of SIMD lanes.
userbinator 4y ago
I get that Engineers tend to be more practical in their names, and don't have the finesse that marketing is looking for. I thought they could've just used the codenames, or whatever is actually written on the GPU IC itself... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_40_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces... ...but then you realise they called the "12GB 4080" an AD104-400, and the "16GB 4080" an AD103-300, while the 4090 got named the AD102-300.
CivBase 4y ago
I'd be shocked if the original names were engineering decisions. Seems blatently obvious that marketing just re-badged the 4070 at the last minute and it backfired.
- ForOldHack 4y ago
  They have done it multiple times before.
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago

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wongarsu 4y ago

Yeah, even if they had a good reason not to call one the 4070, the whole thing could still have been avoided by just calling them the 4085 and 4080. And the marketing people could probably have come up with something even cooler sounding, if somebody would have just stopped them from going with 4080 12GB and 4080 16GB.

FractalParadigm 4y ago
The funny thing is Nvidia already has 2 sub-part-numbers for better-than-the-xxx0-cards, without creating another line of xxx5 products. The 16GB could have been branded 4080 Ti or 4080 Super with the 12GB being the 'base' 4080.
- tracker1 4y ago
  That was my thought... they should have just called it a "Super" still leaving room for a Ti model later. Or bring back GS designation after... 4080 and 4080 GS. They had lots of options to add distinction.

yamtaddle 4y ago

There was a golden age in the '00s when it was possible to get the gist of what Nvidia and ATI card names meant without consulting a very dense table. It was nice.

systemvoltage 4y ago
It was amazing actually. Intel's marketing was so spectacular. Blue man group. Bunny suit commercials. Pentium, what a name. Intel Inside, those two words start an uninitiated jingle in my head. This is not looking through it with rose tinted glasses and nostalgia. It was objectively better, fun, straightforward and iconic. Not a single person knows what Intel's (or AMD, nVidia, Apple, etc.)'s advertisements after 2000's. Do you remember the last Apple ad? No. It is all generic, designer bullshit. All of it has gone to toilet. Marketing people have lost it across the board.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  Oh please, AMD CPUs had lower clocks so to compete with Intel's (making up numbers to illustrate the point) 2.3Ghz where theirs was 2.1Ghz, they would call it Athlon 2300 or something to the effect. They may have had a point that their 2.1Ghz was as good as Intel's 2.3Ghz chip, but it's not been straightforward, probably, since a 286. (Edit, I meant to reply to the parent comment)
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    See Mac vs PC ads. Still memorable and impactful.
    - bigmattystyles 4y ago
      To be honest without looking it up, all I remember is stoner Steve. Dude, you’re getting a dell vs the Jeff goldblum mac ad that showcased pc cabling vs simple Mac. Still smile when I think of stoner Steve.
- blagie 4y ago
  I agree. I think a deeper problem is it takes a Ph.D in Intel / AMD branding to understand what to buy. An 80486 was faster than an 80386, and 33MHz was slower than 66MHz. It was simple. Intel's i7 line-up goes from 2 to 16 cores, 1-4GHz, spanning 13 generations. Toss in i3/i5/i7/i9, and lines like Atom and Xeon. Each time I need to upgrade my computer, I groan. It's not just less fun, it's positively miserable. Most people I know either buy the cheapest possible computer, or an Apple. I don't know why Intel thinks anyone will spend extra if they have no idea what they're buying. Most non-Apple users I know have phones with faster processor, higher-resolution displays, and for higher prices than their laptops.

reaperducer 4y ago

These big companies really need to get naming input from someone other than marketing teams It's not the marketing teams to blame. Marketing teams name things iPod, or MacBook, or PlayDate. I don't know who names things at Intel, or Nvidia, or Sony, but it's not the marketing team. At least not a good one.

rjmunro 4y ago
Marketing teams name things 360, One, One S, One X, Series S and Series X. I think that's the right order, I'm not sure.
- TillE 4y ago
  When the Xbox One was announced, people complained that it was confusing, but really it had been long enough since the original Xbox that the name was just silly, not confusing. The One/Series S/X crap is genuinely baffling, totally incomprehensible unless you've really been keeping up with every Xbox release. You can go on Wikipedia and figure it out in a few minutes, but...you should not have to do that.
  - monkpit 4y ago
    Don’t forget the OG offender in this category, the PSOne / PSX
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      In Sony's defense, everything else with the PlayStation was actually pretty straightforward. PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, and PS5. "PSOne" was a weird way to brand a slim console, but it's still obvious that it's a PS1. And while Sony did originally use PSX to refer to the PS1, that was an internal codename, i.e. "different from the Nintendo PlayStation[0]". The gaming press ran with it because people in that era insisted on awkward three-letter acronyms for all games consoles. Reusing it for a weird PS2 DVR combo unit is still way better than Microsoft launching two different consoles with the same name. [0] The cancelled SNES variant with the also-cancelled Super CD add-on built-in, both built by Sony.

sulcate 4y ago

But that's not the point. It's not meant to be intelligible. The point is marketing, aka to misinform consumers. It's working as expected and it happens in every field. Choosing obscure names that make it extremely hard to compare characteristics within products by a company, much less to compare to outside competitors, is not a bug --- it's a feature. Try buying a bike and figuring out how to compare it to other bikes by the same manufacturer from this year or last, or try to figure out what features it carries. You're left doing what you always do: staring at 7 tabs with spec sheets and slowly trying to absorb the features of the various "poorly" named offerings It's anti consumer and I'm surprised there's not more outrage, given that a market purportedly should consist of rational consumers making informed decisions.

jamiek88 4y ago
>given that a market purportedly should consist of rational consumers making informed decisions. And that misconception of humans by economists has had massive repercussions. No human is rational. We are emotion machines riding hormone waves. Fatigue, hunger, anger, arousal all affect our choices and can be gamed.

aprdm 4y ago

To their credit, they did roll it back

dinobones 4y ago

I'm still mad about CUDA cores. I thought I was going to be able to write some epic 1000x level parallelism running individually on all cores. It turns out, a CUDA core is not actually a "core."

Melatonic 4y ago
Why do they call it that then? I never really looked into it that much and just took as a measure of a certain type of compute capability ( FP16 or FP64 right? )
- wmf 4y ago
  The SIMT architecture makes it look to the programmer like each FPU is a separate core, but all the cores in an SM have to run in lockstep to get good performance.
- monocasa 4y ago
  They use that metric because it makes their marketing specs look nicer. Ultimately it's a count of the number of SIMD lanes.

userbinator 4y ago

I get that Engineers tend to be more practical in their names, and don't have the finesse that marketing is looking for. I thought they could've just used the codenames, or whatever is actually written on the GPU IC itself... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_40_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces... ...but then you realise they called the "12GB 4080" an AD104-400, and the "16GB 4080" an AD103-300, while the 4090 got named the AD102-300.

CivBase 4y ago

I'd be shocked if the original names were engineering decisions. Seems blatently obvious that marketing just re-badged the 4070 at the last minute and it backfired.

ForOldHack 4y ago
They have done it multiple times before.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]