Note that Tesla's designs were IIRC two-phase which is largely inferior to three-phase. The push for three-phase and associated designs and inventions (three phase transformers on a single core etc.) came from outside the US.
This is by far the dominant case of invention. Truly independent work is incredibly rare.
Also, there's no accounting for taste but I find even his non-serious comics puerile and not terribly funny - pretty much one step above Taboola chum, or Jim Davis for millenials. Most of the "humor" and overplayed hook is simply describing everyday things with odd adjectives, ie hair cave=vagina, saliva=evil mouth juice, wow. There's probably a term for this trope.. Anyway, it gets clicks on Facebook.
In a few years, the temporary monopoly falls away and the benefit passes to everyone.
I think they should work to make them even cheaper and easier to file.
They didn't even invent the numerical methods themselves (pure mathematics from other countries from long ago), they were just first to file for a particular application.
I wonder, was the name Ampere a reference to its titanic current consumption?
Those only reason to put those on the PCB would be to provide current above 1kA
Worth pointing out that that's not really new. Gaming cards have been running at about a Volt for a bunch of years now and all of those chuck 250+ W, so the currents are rather substantial.
* GeForce (for Andrea Geforce, the first to use the color electric green)
* Riva (for Jose Riva, the discoverer that you can use TNT to generate electricity.)
Thanks Scott, Gary and Ross (founders of 3Dfx) you cards gave me and my friends thousands of hours of enjoyment.
So what does "Radeon" mean?
Edit: Yes according to Wiki. So we may never know whether Before was actually dedicated to the person. I remember vaguely reading PC Gamer at the time that was not the case at all.
> The "GeForce" name originated from a contest held by Nvidia in early 1999 called "Name That Chip". The company called out to the public to name the successor to the RIVA TNT2 line of graphics boards. There were over 12,000 entries received and 7 winners received a RIVA TNT2 Ultra graphics card as a reward.[2][3]
- https://web.archive.org/web/20000608011648/http://www.nvidia...
- https://tweakers.net/nieuws/1967/nVidia-Name-that-chip-conte...
So not sure the origin is actually from Andrea Geforce, I can certainly not find any sources that confirm that.
Another legend says that they once could not get a new model of electron microscope working before showing it on an international exposition. The image was always blurry. They ran out of time, so they just took it to the exposition to fix it there. But it worked flawlessly there! Turns out this was due to the tram troley lines running next to the company building interferring with the electron optics. :)
People should be encouraged to ask questions, even if from a position of lesser knowledge of the matter at hand. Those that do answer are probably not only helping the person asking the question, but those who may not ask the question even if it is one in their mind.
How many others refrain from enriching the dialogue for the same reasons?
Also, questions that could be answered with a quick internet search don't make good discussion.
You are correct in saying some questions are better than others. But again that's no reason to downvote as it actively discourages people from participation. I would think the best course would be to ignore and move on as the original comment on this thread mentioned. Downvoting can be a hostile action. Ignoring is neutral.
As per the guidelines themselves: >Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Case in point, my comment was downvoted, even though the subsequent comment was an illuminating reminder for myself and possibly others. Those downvotes seem somewhat arbitrary at best, hostile at worst.
I've no more to say so I will refrain from any further comments on voting dynamic.
Obviously if you are "in the know" they are not really the same type of processor but it is closer than you usually see companies get with their trademarks
The type of questions being downvoted sometimes makes me question sanity. In general I believe that downvoting is probably one of the most poisonous thing invented in newsgroups.
The US is quite generous in what you can trademark. In the EU for example you can't (as easily) trademark common words. But a quick search shows about 50 active EU trademarks on the word Tesla.
[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e4eaa83d-47dc...
It's pretty common - the Apple Newton(TM) and Salesforce Einstein(TM) spring to mind.
Ampere, Ampere Semiconductor and Ampere Computing are all registered trademarks of the computing company in the class NVidia would need, and they'd have a good case this this is causing confusion (they'd probably cite this thread).
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
If someone thinks the question is stupid or not doesn't mean that a downvote is warranted. (nor an upvote, answer the question and move on.)
To answer though; it's just a coincidence, as you might already know Nvidia uses famous scientists (especially in the field of electricity) as the names of their microarchitectures.
* Volta (Alessandro Volta, inventor of the electric battery)
* Tesla (inventor/designer of A/C current)
* Maxwell (James Clerk Maxwell, founder of electromagnetic radiation)
* Pascal (Blaise Pascal, lots of science around "pressure", arguably his work led to the creation of vacuum tubes used in early computers)
Ampere (from André-Marie Ampère, who lent his name to his discovery and classification of "amps") is just an electrical scientists name.
Coincidentally a new company founded in 2017 decided that it was a good name for them, and thus the confusion.