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Comment by ShakataGaNai | Hacker News Reader

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....

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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.

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.

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)

See Mac vs PC ads. Still memorable and impactful.

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.

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.

Agree on the misery. I was speccing out a build and inadvertently picked a 2019 processor because it was extremely unclear.

(I'm now actually looking at an AMD 7700 rig, because intel won't do ECC on "desktop" CPUs, except for a rare chipset that I can't find a mobo for sale at the moment...)

AMD + ECC is nice. That's how I'm set up. Also, RAID. I've been very happy with general system stability.

It's the Packard-Bell marketing strategy. Confuse the marketplace with a profusion of similar models so that comparison shopping can't be easily applied by casual buyers.

That strategy works well in a lot of places, but it's not what's going on here. This is just plain old incompetence and mismanagement. It's a mess, rather than a strategy.

For Intel, it just results in most buyers buying the cheapest possible system since there is no way to tell what's what. Intel would make a lot more selling $400 CPUs than $50 CPUs, but to do that, people would need to see the value.

The 13 generations is particularly bad, if you're just trying to comment to someone looking for a used system, when half the time they just list "Core i7" which is meaningless without at least a model generation.

> Do you remember the last Apple ad?

Yes, and dear God am I sick of it. AFAICT, they've bought all advertising space on the web, mobile, and TV for me, at the moment. (It's the one of the iPhone auto-dialing 911 in a wreck.)

I'm (still) not buying an iPhone.

The last Apple ad I remember was that song 1234 by Feist.

Which was… 2007.

Are you maybe thinking of CPUs back when they were marketed by clock speed? Because GPU naming has always been a mess. In the mid 2000s for example you had the Nvidia Geforce 7 series with product names such as: 7800 GS, 7800 GT, 7800 GTX, 7900 GS, 7900 GT, 7900 GTX, 7900 GTO, 7900 GX2. They've been moderately consistent with "bigger numbers in the name = higher end card" but beyond that you can't tell anything meaningful without comparing the cards in a table.

At least they didn't reuse the names... unlike e.g. the three variants of the "GT730" they released.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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_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.

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."

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? )

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.

They use that metric because it makes their marketing specs look nicer.

Ultimately it's a count of the number of SIMD lanes.

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.

They have done it multiple times before.

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.

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.

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.

Don’t forget the OG offender in this category, the PSOne / PSX

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.

The order is 360, One, Series.

The letter is just tier.

It's remarkable how thoroughly they managed to outdo the confusing nature of "One". Who would look at "Xbox Series" and think that's the name of a specific generation? It's an artistic masterpiece.

Clearly some departments of Sony have engineers naming things. No marketing team would put out a product names the "Sony WH-1000XM4" not to be confused with the "Sony WF-1000XM4".

Overall Nvidia generally has a very good naming system. They are easy to understand if you look at them for more than a minute. Nvidia is 4090? 40 = Generation. 90 = Model. Higher model # is better. They've stuck with the general concept for the better part of 20 years.

Intel's naming is decent. Their cutsey names like Sandy Bridge, meh. No one can never remember those. But the Core numbering system is solid. i3 is lowest. i9 is highest. The processor numbers after that can be a little hard and do require a bit of a decorder matrix to understand. But as long as it's a system, with rules, that they follow, and can be explained fairly easily - I'm ok with it. Heck they have a page that gives you the magic decoder ring: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor...

I'll be honestly concerned for Sony if they stop naming their products from random bash line noise.

It's now as much part of their brand as all other things are.

Except Nvidia uses the same branding for it's mobile and desktop chips, and in the past have rebadged different architectures under multiple gen numbers. (GT 510/520/605/610/710 all the GF119 chip)

It's all pretty bad.

Acer's monitor naming looks like a cat walked on someone's keyboard - KVbmiipruzx

The best named monitor recently is probably the Waysus 22.

KV looks like a Sony prefix for CRT TVs (the "k" presumably stands for "kinescope", which is the name for a CRT in a number of non-English languages.)

But I think the long and mysterious-at-first-glance model numbering is usually a good thing since it encodes a lot of useful information.

Sony’s naming problem is not because of engineers; It’s clearly the marketing team, and the goal is most certainly to make this incomparable, across continents, across years, or between the one that was given to the reviewers/journals/comparators and the ones that the customers can actually purchase.

Sony’s problem is that they try to sell bad products for the price of expensive ones, and the best way to do that is to have incomprehensible names.

The MDR-7506 has just as obscure a name as anything they're selling; it's not clear to me that the naming is so much a strategy as a lack thereof...

I think the goal is more so that big chains can sell model numbers that nobody else sells, making it risk-free for them to promise “we’ll match any cheaper price”.

For what it's worth, I bought a high end TV recently, the Sony Bravia A90J. I've left out some of the full product name, but this info is all you need if you care to look up that TV.

When I was looking in physical stores, at physical devices, I noticed that there were important differences between the [A-Z][8-9]0[A-Z]s, when I would research the model numbers online. 80 vs 90 indicated jumps in overall quality, depending on the other letters in the model name, which usually meant that the product was created specifically for the store (like Best Buy vs Costco vs buying direct), and would have other minor differences from the 'true' version.

A regular person would have probably just looked at the TVs in-store and decided based on whatever looked best, but I happened to have some specific features I wanted, and the weird-ass model names helped.

The A90J is the top model right? Was looking at those myself recently. Amazon warehouse occasionally has a cheap deal on one but I am always scared those probably have dead pixels.

I really wanted a Panasonic Plasma but it looks like the sole importer may not be getting them anymore or might be getting less. But from what I understand the A90J and the top end Panasonics are the best in that they have a much better heatsink

A90J is, by the research I did and the word of the person who sold it to me (a family friend, has owned a TV business for 25 years, and gave me his at-cost price), the best. I absolutely love it. And yes, the panel + heatsink are top notch. Some other models/brands use the same panel, but lack the stronger heatsinks, and aren't able to utilize it as best as possible.

It runs Android TV, which may or may not be a dealbreaker for you, but I enjoy it enough. I just wanted to be free of a vendor-specific TV os, in order to give myself more flexibility when I try to set up a pi-hole in the future. There's also a hardware switch to disable the TV's microphone.

Also, the sound comes out from the panel itself, and is (to me) great. It calibrates itself using the microphone within the remote, by having you hold it a certain way when performing setup.

Finally, there's an incredibly posh and satisfying 'click' noise when you turn it off. I don't know why, but this makes me like the TV more.

TV naming is especially crazy. They have variants for everything from geopraphical location to specific sales events.

My TV lacks the ability to transmit audio via Bluetooth (no, I can't enable it, I think it actually lacks the module). Nobody could have told me that before I bought it, the marketing material and manuals all claim that it has it. There is precisely NO documentation for my specific model.

I'm starting to think that they're actively counting on people not completely testing their devices after getting them.

I bought a TV from Fry's. There's no mention in the English manual, but according to the internet, this model has a DVR built-in, but it only activates if you tell it you're in Brazil when you first set it up.

I think you need to at least also consider the generation along with the bucket for Intel CPUs. For most users a 12th gen i3 is better than a ninth gen anything, yet plenty of retailers kept old laptop skus around long enough you would see both side by side at a retailer

No I cannot agree that Nvidia naming system is any good.

First, one could think that larger number means larger performance but this is not always the case. Second, one might think that "Ti" or "super" GPU is better than a regular one in every aspect but this is not the case also.

The same is about Intel. The best naming scheme is where numbers reflect performance or core count or cache size so that they can easily be compared by a consumer.

What is an iPod without context? Some sort of protective case with an RFID tag maybe?

PlayDate - is that a video conferencing product?

These are not good product names

Context is required for basically all product names, unless they've managed to make themselves generic. Ex https://www.businessinsider.com/google-taser-xerox-brand-nam... . Even then, if they are "generic" they still often require context of a specific country or language.

If I ask you about a Mustang, what do you think about first? Are you into cars and it's a Ford Mustang? Are you into Horses? Are you into Planes? Or maybe you're into ships? Heck, there is an entire list of options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustang_(disambiguation)

A good name is memorable, not necessarily descriptive. Most product and company names today are made up anyways. Or they are named after something else in a completely arbitrary fashion.

The problem comes when a company establishes a name for one thing, then uses it for another. The iPhone is a good name in concept. Pro/Max/Ultra/Mini not withstanding. But what if tomorrow Apple said there was an iPhone Super Ultra Max that was 10" and couldn't make calls. People would argue that was an iPad and that this new Super Ultra Max was a stupid name.

It is weird because Nvidia clearly has an instinct to give their cards car names (with the GTX, GT, RTX, etc etc stuff). They should just get rid of the numbers for the most part.

4090 -> 2022 Nvidia Optium

4080 -> 2022 Nvidia Melium

4070 -> 2022 Nvidia Bonum

4060 -> 2022 Nvidia Benem

(I barand-name-ified the latin words for best/better/good/okay).

Without the numbers, you have no idea which one’s better at a glance (which is why they’re retracting the “other” 4080).

And “Bonum”… are you sure?

The problem with the numbers is that we expect them to have some meaning. There's no inherent ordering between maxima/altima/sentra but if you are shopping for Nissan cars you figure it out. If you are spending a couple thousand dollars on something you shouldn't pick at a glance, you should look at the specs.

Bonum -- apparently that's the latin word for good? I dunno I just dropped words into google translate and then hacked off letters at random to fit the pattern. I'm sure they can come up with better fake words.

To their credit, they did roll it back

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