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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia always named their microarchitectures after famous scientists: Ada, Ampere, Turing, Pascal, Maxwell, Kepler, Fermi, Tesla.

I guess what's unique with Ada is that they're using her first name? Though most official sources call it Ada Lovelace in full.

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Was about to post something questioning the "forever" part because my memory only starts to link Nvidia generations with scientist somewhere around Kepler. And that's despite having followed GPU tech a lot more in the years before. But according to Wikipedia it goes back to the days of the Riva TNT: the wiki seems undecided about Fahrenheit-ness of earlier generations, but I'd consider that close enough for "forever".

I think they started with hotness and switched to scientists as a more sustainable source for names

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38252900

The "hotness" were also scientists

I believe the issue with Lovelace is that you may find less than PG results typing that on a search engine. Hence using Ada primarily on the marketing.

I think the complaint is more with the consumer card being 4xxx but this is 5000 both on the same architecture.

Yeah they have different naming conventions on the workstation cards;

Quadro RTX 4000

RTX A4000

RTX 4000 Ada

Unfortunately they’ve had 3 separate naming conventions in 3 successive generations. Those 4000 series cards are in the same position in the lineup for each generation.

I just went through this with our Dell rep. The generations aren't totally successive, if you count the non-Quadro RTX 4000 series, which is Ada generation but not part of the RTX 4000 Ada series.

Add to it the card variants, and there's a chance that you might still end up with the wrong part if your purchaser isn't careful.

Yes but they historically do not put the architecture name in the product name like that. They also never use the naming scheme of their consumer graphics cards on their workstation line. They've always had a different system. This card breaks both of those conventions. Workstation cards are supposed to be Quadro. But it looks like they've rebranded the line as "Nvidia RTX". I can only assume that was an intentional move to make their lineup more confusing.

They 100% used (at least) Tesla and Maxwell in press releases/product SKUs.

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