Same here. I'm amazed they haven't battled this out in court, the only reason I can think of is that ampere is an SI unit and not an invented word so any registered trademark must be very narrow. There's definitively marketplace confusion here.
And it is the name of a guy also. IT is doubtful that Amperecomputing could trademark Ampere. And well, if nVidia chooses to use the name, more publicity for them (and being a new company, that is a bonus).
"IT is doubtful that Amperecomputing could trademark Ampere". They actually filed for an "AMPERE" (only all caps?) trademark back on November 2017 and they had it registered -after a very long process of examinations, oppositions by other parties (Nvidia?), extensions, "divisional requests", initial refusals, exparte appeals etc etc- on February 2020 : https://trademarks.justia.com/879/80/ampere-879808...
Their "AMPERE COMPUTING" trademark application is bizarrely less lucky, despite being more narrow and specific. It is currently on its second extension and still has not been registered..
Ampere is the name of a company, not a product / CPU part. Ampere Computing registered "Ampere" as a trademark (almost certainly narrowly, as a company only) when they were founded back in 2017 (long before Nvidia's Ampere release). How do I know that? I don't even need to look far, just click the link at the end and check out that ® right next to "Ampere" at the top.
Nvidia, therefore, do not and cannot have a case against Ampere,in any court, due to the latter's rather long pre-existence, their pre-existing trademark and its (apparent) narrowness. Do Ampere have a case against Nvidia though? Almost certainly not due to the same reasons and due to the vetting of "Ampere" as product name by Nvidia's legal team. Furthermore Nvidia recently partnered with Ampere for CUDA support and they also announced a reference design GPU-accelerated Ampere eMAG server.
While I'm more than a bit sad that this is all about hardware that I'll never touch, it's nice to see all these newcomer companies take serious aim at the server space and seeing the beginnings of some real competition there for the first time in over a decade. I hope we'll be able to see benchmarks of these systems in due time, and I'm also interested to see what Nuvia will come out with.
It seems to be all about Intel having fumbled the process advantage lead they used to have really badly. So badly that not only did they get caught, it's questionable if they can ever even come back to parity.
Apple certainly saw the writing on the wall a few years ago, which is why they are moving back to producing their own CPUs again rather than staying on the sinking Intel ship.
Another clear trend in computing is many-core. For the moment, enthusiasts/gamers don't care that much about it because there are basically no game engines that are really infinitely scalable in terms of cores. But I wouldn't be surprised if a couple console generations from now, they have 32 or 64 core CPUs. Once it's possible to actually max out a 64-core CPU in the typical apps that most people would be running, then everyone will want them.
> It seems to be all about Intel having fumbled the process advantage lead they used to have really badly.
No, it's more to do with the poor efficiency of the x86 ISA, which is why it failed in mobile. x86 was bound to run out of steam at some point. ARMv8 has a bit more room for improvement. This was inevitable.
Having a look at figure 4 schedulers load becomes visible and explains ~85% node utilization on two years period, average waiting time for public queues on Tachyon2 system ~9.3h https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/7/2634/pdf It's about cores and node utilization, but maybe also about more dynamic bandwidth and dynamic interconnecting abroad? Interconnect family: https://www.top500.org/statistics/efficiency-power...
Interesting that only 32 lanes can be dedicated to inter-socket communication - that is *much* less than Rome (Epyc 7002 series can dedicate either 64 or 48 lanes) despite having almost identical per-socket memory and I/O bandwidth. I'll be curious to see how/if this impacts performance.
Also interesting that the full I/O and memory capabilities are available even on the 45W and 58W TDP parts - I would expect those to take up a huge portion of such a small power budget.
"I must credit Ampere here. This is by far the easiest product naming scheme I’ve ever seen. Intel could learn a million things from this naming scheme alone."
Agreed. And not only the naming, but also the very meaningful product differentiation is something I wish I'd see from Intel. Do we really need 4 different Core i5, which only differ by 100 - 200 MHz?
The beginning of the end for Intel? They're still strong for anything server-related but Xeons don't look competitive when faced with Rome and Altra. If you want the best x86 bang for the buck, go for AMD; for the most performance per watt, go for ARM. Intel's being squeezed in the middle and continuing process woes aren't helping.
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19 Comments
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drexnx - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
clicked thinking this was about Nvidia Ampere and that they renamed SMs "cores" or somethingI was sadly mistaken.
Drkrieger01 - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
Same! I'm kinda wishing the architecture name wasn't reused, but I guess it really doesn't make sense to patent that part of the IP.Kjella - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
Same here. I'm amazed they haven't battled this out in court, the only reason I can think of is that ampere is an SI unit and not an invented word so any registered trademark must be very narrow. There's definitively marketplace confusion here.Pyrostemplar - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
And it is the name of a guy also.IT is doubtful that Amperecomputing could trademark Ampere. And well, if nVidia chooses to use the name, more publicity for them (and being a new company, that is a bonus).
Santoval - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
"IT is doubtful that Amperecomputing could trademark Ampere".They actually filed for an "AMPERE" (only all caps?) trademark back on November 2017 and they had it registered -after a very long process of examinations, oppositions by other parties (Nvidia?), extensions, "divisional requests", initial refusals, exparte appeals etc etc- on February 2020 :
https://trademarks.justia.com/879/80/ampere-879808...
Their "AMPERE COMPUTING" trademark application is bizarrely less lucky, despite being more narrow and specific. It is currently on its second extension and still has not been registered..
Santoval - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Ampere is the name of a company, not a product / CPU part. Ampere Computing registered "Ampere" as a trademark (almost certainly narrowly, as a company only) when they were founded back in 2017 (long before Nvidia's Ampere release). How do I know that? I don't even need to look far, just click the link at the end and check out that ® right next to "Ampere" at the top.Nvidia, therefore, do not and cannot have a case against Ampere,in any court, due to the latter's rather long pre-existence, their pre-existing trademark and its (apparent) narrowness. Do Ampere have a case against Nvidia though? Almost certainly not due to the same reasons and due to the vetting of "Ampere" as product name by Nvidia's legal team. Furthermore Nvidia recently partnered with Ampere for CUDA support and they also announced a reference design GPU-accelerated Ampere eMAG server.
https://amperecomputing.com/
Dolda2000 - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
While I'm more than a bit sad that this is all about hardware that I'll never touch, it's nice to see all these newcomer companies take serious aim at the server space and seeing the beginnings of some real competition there for the first time in over a decade. I hope we'll be able to see benchmarks of these systems in due time, and I'm also interested to see what Nuvia will come out with.twtech - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
It seems to be all about Intel having fumbled the process advantage lead they used to have really badly. So badly that not only did they get caught, it's questionable if they can ever even come back to parity.Apple certainly saw the writing on the wall a few years ago, which is why they are moving back to producing their own CPUs again rather than staying on the sinking Intel ship.
Another clear trend in computing is many-core. For the moment, enthusiasts/gamers don't care that much about it because there are basically no game engines that are really infinitely scalable in terms of cores. But I wouldn't be surprised if a couple console generations from now, they have 32 or 64 core CPUs. Once it's possible to actually max out a 64-core CPU in the typical apps that most people would be running, then everyone will want them.
mode_13h - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
> It seems to be all about Intel having fumbled the process advantage lead they used to have really badly.No, it's more to do with the poor efficiency of the x86 ISA, which is why it failed in mobile. x86 was bound to run out of steam at some point. ARMv8 has a bit more room for improvement. This was inevitable.
back2future - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
connecting ARM and x64, getting versatile advantages?https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/pr...
back2future - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
orhttps://www.computeexpresslink.org/download-the-sp...
back2future - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
Having a look at figure 4 schedulers load becomes visible and explains ~85% node utilization on two years period, average waiting time for public queues on Tachyon2 system ~9.3hhttps://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/7/2634/pdf
It's about cores and node utilization, but maybe also about more dynamic bandwidth and dynamic interconnecting abroad?
Interconnect family: https://www.top500.org/statistics/efficiency-power...
thetrashcanisfull - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
Interesting that only 32 lanes can be dedicated to inter-socket communication - that is *much* less than Rome (Epyc 7002 series can dedicate either 64 or 48 lanes) despite having almost identical per-socket memory and I/O bandwidth. I'll be curious to see how/if this impacts performance.Also interesting that the full I/O and memory capabilities are available even on the 45W and 58W TDP parts - I would expect those to take up a huge portion of such a small power budget.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
Maybe the TDP is just for the cores?mode_13h - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Isn't x32 the max number of lanes that PCIe can bond? AMD clearly got around that, somehow, but maybe Ampere is using some off-the-shelf PCIe IP.MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - link
"I must credit Ampere here. This is by far the easiest product naming scheme I’ve ever seen. Intel could learn a million things from this naming scheme alone."Agreed. And not only the naming, but also the very meaningful product differentiation is something I wish I'd see from Intel. Do we really need 4 different Core i5, which only differ by 100 - 200 MHz?
serendip - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
The beginning of the end for Intel? They're still strong for anything server-related but Xeons don't look competitive when faced with Rome and Altra. If you want the best x86 bang for the buck, go for AMD; for the most performance per watt, go for ARM. Intel's being squeezed in the middle and continuing process woes aren't helping.techbug - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
" This means 50 GB/s in each direction, and 192 PCIe 4.0 lanes in a dual socket system for add-in cards"32lanes * 25GT/s / 8 bit/B = 100GB/s?
carcakes - Friday, April 9, 2021 - link
Ampere® Altra™ Family of Cloud Native Processors expands to 128 cores with Altra Max™. They do workstations as well.Maybe notebooks..