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Comment by siscia | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know why AMD is picking Italian city names for the EPYC line?

Because they're giving Intel the boot.

AMD has been using place names for their CPUs for several years, particularly since the K8/Athlon 64 era. They just seem to be using Italian cities this time around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_AMD_processors

Place names avoids trademark conflicts.

not necessarily:

https://www.champagne.fr/en/comite-champagne/bureaus/bureaus...

I'm not aware of any cases of code names that run afoul of trademarks, are you?

All of Intel's codenames are real place names as well, and have been that way for a long time.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Lake

Apple does the same thing with recent macOS releases, which are all places in California.

I imagine it's about as exciting as most codenames: "we needed to decide some naming scheme, and someone suggested those place names because they like the places".

"What's red that we could name a CPU after?"

"Blood?"

"Too gross, and not enough variations."

"Rubies?"

"People would find a way to confuse the CPUs with the programming language, and besides, if Twitter digs up those tech demos of ours we're totally gonna get cancelled."

"Romans?"

"Sure, Romans are cool, and they conquer things, like we're going to conquer Intel. I like it."

"How about emperors?"

"Fine in principle, but they each did at least a few scandalous things... besides, we probably don't want the "history class" vibe, or the energy of the weird uncle who always wants to talk about Roman battle tactics at dinner."

"Yeah, fair enough. Cities, then? I visited Milan the other year..."

(30 minutes later)

"Cities it is!"

> "Well", he said, "cities are OK, but not little cities that nobody's ever heard of. They ought to be WORLD CLASS cities!"

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=World_Class_Citi...

Same reason Intel did mountains and then lakes. They needed a theme that had enough names for it to last a good long while. Better choice than Apple's to go with big cats. They ran out too quickly.

My first custom PC back in 2004 was an Athlon 64 3000+ "Venice" 1.8GHz single core with 512kb L2 cache. The "San Diego" was better because it had 1MB cache. I managed to overclock it to 2.8GHz. What a time to be alive.

So it's something they've been doing to some extent for almost 20 years.

someone else already took most of the world's lakes.

They are beautiful places. Plus, great food.

I’d imagine you’d need an extended executive fact-finding trip to decide whether it’s a place you want to associate your company with.

I feel there is a niche for a startup in there somewhere. ;-)

Let's do it so that the executives don't have to.

I for one can't take "EPYC Bergamo" seriously.

Come on, Bergamo? For real? I guess it could sound "cool" to non-Italian speakers, but here in Italy I think that Bergamo is one of the most forgettable cities ever. Which is sad, because its historical city centre is very beautiful, but the rest of the city is kind of dull and boring.

I wonder how many people in charge or purchasing actually consider the name, unconsciously or not. It could be called Thready McThreadface for all I care.

Outside of Italy, Bergamo is probably most famous for being the place you end up if you book a cheap flight to "Milano".

Of course, once this hits the market it won't actually be sold as the EPYC Bergamo, but rather the EPYC 9873 or whatever

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