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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

They name their architectures after scientists (Maxwell, Pascal, Turing, Volta, Ampere, Lovelace, Hopper). Thats what the GPU initial stands for.

As for the number, the die name counts down to 100 (with GA107, for instance, being a small GPU die and GA100 being the big one), and the big datacenter GPU as a product inherits the 100.

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it'd be nice if they picked them in alphabetical order

I'm surprised nobody at nvidia brought this up

The naming scheme goes back to at least 2004 (Curie), and Wikipedia has done the service of alphabetizing it for us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponyms_of_Nvidia_GP...

Also, it occurred to me that Nvidia does sometimes increment the die to 200 (EG GM200, as the Maxwell 100 series was a single small oddball die). Its possible that they "refreshed" the GH100 die and are codenaming it GH200.

At first they used "measures of hotness", but ran out a few generations in. Coincidentally, degrees of warmth are all named after scientists. So they continued with scientists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(microarchitectur... -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius_(microarchitecture) -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_(microarchitecture) -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_(microarchitecture)

Which scientist is letter B?

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

Bohr?

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