“Tesla” may be a pretty cool name for a data center lineup, but unfortunately for NVIDIA, its GPUs are not the first thing that comes to mind when consumers hear it. As Heise reports, the company has decided to scrap the Tesla branding from its server products to avoid confusion with the famed electric automaker headed by Elon Musk. This is evident based on the moniker of NVIDIA’s latest accelerator, which is simply called the GA100.
“The changeover took place last year, but hidden: NVIDIA renamed the Turing accelerator card presented as Tesla T4 to NVIDIA T4,” wrote Heise. “The old name can still be found in press releases from 2018. By the way, retailers have not noticed the change as much as the press and partner manufacturers: Corresponding systems continue to carry the name Tesla T4.”
The Tesla name was initially used for the C870 GPU Computing Module, which launched on May 2, 2007. This was a card with a 600 MHz core clock, 1350 base clock, 128 CUDA cores, and 1.5 GB of GDDR3 memory.
It’s unclear whether NVIDIA is brainstorming a new name for its future data center GPUs. How about Boring, Hyperloop, Neuralink, or OpenAI?