NVIDIA Discontinues the Tesla Brand to Avoid Confusion with Tesla Car Maker

btarunr · May 20, 2020

At its ambitious "Ampere" A100 Tensor Core processor reveal, the "Tesla" brand was nowhere to be seen. Heise.de reports that the company has decided to discontinue "Tesla" as the top-level brand for its HPC, AI, and scalar compute accelerator product line. NVIDIA introduced the Tesla compute accelerator brand along with its "Tesla" graphics architecture. It was the first major GPGPU product, and saw CUDA take flight as a prominent scalar compute language.

Over the years, NVIDIA kept the Tesla moniker as a top-level brand (alongside GeForce and Quadro), with an alphabetic portion of the model numbers denoting the graphics architecture the accelerator is based on (eg: Tesla P100 being "Pascal" based, K10 being "Kepler" based, and M40 being "Maxwell" based). The Tesla T4, based on "Turing," is the final product with the old nomenclature. Interestingly, Heise reports that NVIDIA dropped the name to avoid confusion with fellow Californian brand Tesla Inc.

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Vya Domus · May 20, 2020

Kind of hilarious. Still salty that they ditched them in favor of in house solutions huh ?

Deleted member 185088 · May 20, 2020

Tesla for me is, the scientist, nVidia Tesla and the car company in that order.

nguyen · May 20, 2020

Vya Domus said:
Kind of hilarious. Still salty that they ditched them in favor of in house solutions huh ?

It's called humility, learn the difference...

Dammeron · May 20, 2020

Well, I guess it was Elon Musk that created alternating current technology... So we can't say Nikola's T. name anymore, otherwise we could confuse it with a car brand.

Assimilator · May 20, 2020

I wonder how much Tesla Motors paid NVIDIA for this. Or perhaps the former threatened the latter with a lawsuit.

Dammeron said:
Well, I guess it was Elon Musk that created alternating current technology... So we can't say Nikola's T. name anymore, otherwise we could confuse it with a car brand.

Yeah, the real Tesla would be pretty unimpressed with what mankind has (failed to) achieve.

silentbogo · May 20, 2020

Especially confusing when a Tesla autopilot is powered by Tesla compute units )))
...sorry... Drive PX

Fluffmeister · May 20, 2020

Ironically I heard Nvidia will call their new cards X Æ A-12.

QUANTUMPHYSICS · May 20, 2020

Tesla makes good EV's with inferior interior designs. Surely it's not that big of a deal to associate with Tesla?

And surely there are other scientists to name things after.

DenFox · May 20, 2020

Just call it Marconi, it's even better lol.

rtwjunkie · May 20, 2020

I thought Nvidia's Tesla moniker came before the Tesla automaker? Shouldn't then Musk be the one changing names?

chodaboy19 · May 20, 2020

It's smart because now everything is just Nvidia A100 or whatever. You always mention the company name instead of the product name. BMW has always done it this way.

Also remember when Acura had the Legend? No one even care it was an Acura, people just called it Legend. So Acura dropped names and created some crazy nomenclature like 3.2CL lol

Cranky5150 · May 20, 2020

DenFox said:
Just call it Marconi, it's even better lol.

Along with Edison, Marconi was a thief as well...Tesla was way ahead of both of those jag offs.

Assimilator · May 20, 2020

rtwjunkie said:
I thought Nvidia's Tesla moniker came before the Tesla automaker? Shouldn't then Musk be the one changing names?

I thought so too, but Tesla Motors was founded in 2003 and NVIDIA only started using the moniker 4 years later.

Vya Domus · May 20, 2020

Assimilator said:
NVIDIA only started using the moniker 4 years later.

It's way more than 4 years, I can remember them referring to the compute oriented GPUs as "Tesla" as far back as 2007-2008. In fact that's how it originated, Tesla (the G80 core) was the first CUDA capable GPU architecture hence why "Tesla" became the name for these compute accelerators with no display outputs and such.

Edit : Yes, it's pretty much 4 years later actually, I don't know why I thought it's more than that.

Totally · May 20, 2020

rtwjunkie said:
I thought Nvidia's Tesla moniker came before the Tesla automaker? Shouldn't then Musk be the one changing names?

Nope, no reason too they operate in different industry and therefore don't encroach on each other's trademark. It's just now Tesla the car maker is now ubiquitous and Tesla the compute chip the complete opposite. It's now dead weight in Nvidia's hands.

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NVIDIA Discontinues the Tesla Brand to Avoid Confusion with Tesla Car Maker

btarunr

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