NVIDIA Drops Tesla Branding In Favor to Tesla (the car manufacturer)

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 05/19/2020 03:54 PM | source: Heise | 5 comment(s)

In case you haven't noticed, Nvidia announced their first-born in Ampere architecture last week. The chip is called 'A100' and not 'GA100'. The data center parts did not get a GeForce Tesla naming. As it seems, NVIDIA is steering away from the Tesla branding to not get confused with the car manufacturer.

German base Heise reported the news earlier today. NVIDIA Tesla is gone, and GeForce and Quadro remain. The first Tesla card appeared in summer 2007: The Tesla C870 relied on Nvidia's G80 graphics chip, which was also used on the GeForce 8000 graphics cards. It has been a decade after the first Tesla accelerator card was marketed by them, NVIDIA Tesla is a thing of the past. According to Nvidia, the risk of confusion with the California electric car manufacturer Tesla was simply too great.

The changeover took place last year, but silently: Nvidia renamed the Turing accelerator card presented as Tesla T4 to Nvidia T4. The report from Heise has not yet been confirmed, so it's unclear how they obtained this information.

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Astyanax
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#5789979 Posted on: 05/19/2020 04:18 PM

Nvidia announced the A100 (which the V100 also exists) without direct Tesla naming.

Only the PCIE addin cards were Tesla branded iirc, so it'll be wait and see to find out if this news is correct.

That said, just about every news outlet has called it a Tesla and none of them have been corrected on the record.

schmidtbag
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#5789994 Posted on: 05/19/2020 04:35 PM

I actually found it a bit confusing why they stuck with the Tesla naming at all. Tesla was the GPU codename for the first generation, which was perfectly fine and made sense. But these compute cards should have had a branding totally separate from that, in the same way that gaming cards were part of the "GeForce" series, workstation cards were part of the "Quadro" series, and their flagships were the "Titan" series. So, I felt it was confusing from the very beginning when the compute cards were named after a GPU codename.

Also, why would they make a branding decision in favor of the car manufacturer? First of all, Nvidia has too much of an ego to hand off something like that, but secondly, Nvidia is (understandably) rather salty about Tesla's decision to make their own processors. Lastly, most people who would search for an Nvidia Tesla know exactly what it is they're searching for and would likely ignore the car results, but if someone encountered an Nvidia Tesla when searching for the car, that's basically free advertising.

rl66
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#5790234 Posted on: 05/20/2020 08:22 AM

It make sense as they sell lot less single Tesla card, and sell them in pack or in complete compute system and both have already a different product name...

0blivious
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#5790501 Posted on: 05/20/2020 07:38 PM

Finally some relief for all those people who thought they were buying a Model 3 and ended up with a Video Card.

DLD
Senior Member

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#5790594 Posted on: 05/20/2020 10:01 PM

"to not get confused with the car manufacturer."
Nonsense. Take a look at this (Tesla phones and tablets, Serbia-based producer/distributor):
https://is.gd/eqgrje

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