> Thread + Ripper was a clever play on words: anything that had plenty of threads, the hardware was designed to ‘rip’ through the workload.
Tangent, but is this really a play on words? And if so, what is the other meaning here?
I get the meaning where lots of cores are ripping through workload. But the other one I don't. The closest guess I have is that it's like a comic book hero (The Incredible Hulk) ripping through his clothes because he is so big and powerful. And I don't guess it refers to a seam ripper (the sewing tool).
There is a tool that your grandmother probably used a lot called a seam ripper. You stick the end of it into a seam and pull down and it cuts all the threads that make the seam.
AMD's (and Intel's) marketing teams are awfully enslaved to the gamer market - gamer aesthetics, big bold packaging, insane names that sound like something off of Tron, the whole RGB enchilada.
AMD started it with Ryzen. That name sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings. And then we Threadripper - violent to say the least, and finally, EPYC - cheap play of the letters.
What happened to marketing like the IBM System 360? Elliot Noyes is rolling in his grave. I don't think the marketing teams are to be blamed, its the consumers and the Taiwanese influence around what a computer product should be marketed as such.
I guess I never thought of it in a gaming-oriented way, although it totally makes sense.
Ryzen also sounds like "rising", and even like "horizon", which are both pretty positive and non-gamer-y.
Ripping has other meanings too. It can mean going really fast or energetically, like "the driver ripped right past the race leader on that corner" or "let her rip" when you launch something at full speed. And a sawmill or woodworker uses a circular saw, band saw, etc. to rip wood, which means dividing it along the grain, the natural direction it wants to split. Which I suppose makes a good analogy for embarrassingly parallel compute problems.
Ryzen is hardly any worse than Itanium, Solaris, EPIC, all names of products marketed at businesses in the past.
Personally, I appreciate the optimism (correctly as it turned out) that it would be the line to turn AMD's fortunes around.
I think you've let your perception of the names be affected by the marketing. e.g. the X Box 360 could be the name for a boring server (maybe someone's tenth gen), but instead it's a game console. PS5 and Core are pretty descriptive name compared to the business product names previous.
They're marketing to the people who are affected by such marketing. I'd like to think the rest of us ignore any marketing and choose their CPU's for better reasons.
Tangent, but is this really a play on words? And if so, what is the other meaning here?
I get the meaning where lots of cores are ripping through workload. But the other one I don't. The closest guess I have is that it's like a comic book hero (The Incredible Hulk) ripping through his clothes because he is so big and powerful. And I don't guess it refers to a seam ripper (the sewing tool).