Perhaps it's appropriate for me to link to the free game I made where you play a taxi driving through Disk Defragmenter and delivering stray blocks of data to their final locations: https://safetystoatstudios.itch.io/ddr. It was pretty fun to watch Defragmenter as a kid, but it would have been better if it was interactive, kind of like the 3D maze screensaver.
The generations are all fantasy type names in alphabetical order. The first was Alchemist (and the cards were things like A310) and the next is Celestial. Actually when I think about product names for GPUs and CPUs these seem above average in clarity and only slightly dorkier than average. I'm sure they'll get more confusing and nonsensical with time as that seems to be a constant of the universe.
There is, it's Druid. Intel announced the first four codenames in 2021.
> [...] first generation, based on the Xe HPG microarchitecture, codenamed Alchemist (formerly known as DG2). Intel also revealed the code names of future generations under the Arc brand: Battlemage, Celestial and Druid.
It's their 2nd generation, the 'B' series. The previous was their 'A' / Alchemist.
> According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of story arcs found in video games. Each generation of Arc is named after character classes sorted by each letter of the Latin alphabet in ascending order.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc)
It's dorky but there isn't much else to say about it. Personal GPU enthusiasts are almost always video game enthusiasts so it's not really a particularly weird name in context.
It's just the code name for this generation of their GPU architecture, not the name for its instruction set. Intel's are all fantasy themed. Nvidia names theirs after famous scientists and mathematicians (Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, David Blackwell)
A well-known commercial storage vendor gives their system releases codenames from beer brands. We had Becks, Guinnes, Longboard, Voodoo Ranger, and many others. Presumably what the devs drank during that release cycle, or something ;-)
It's fun for the developers and the end-users alike... So no, it's not limited to GPU enthusiasts at all. Everyone likes codenames :)
That’s what we make sure our codenames are sensible things like Jimmy Carter and James Earl Jones
We were actually told to change our internal names for our servers after someone named an AWS instance “stupid” and I rolled my eyes so hard, one dev ruined the fun for everyone.
I mean, sure, for a lot of the same reasons you can't file a defamation claim in defense of someone who's dead. The idea of them is in the public domain in a lot of ways.
So sure, pour one out to whoever's funeral is on the grocery store tabloids that week with your codenames.
reply