More than anything this post will demonstrate my ignorance to anyone with a passing familiarity with consumer hardware, but my current grievance with AMD is that their GPU names don’t make any sense. One thing that AMD has done in the last two years in make a comeback in the CPU department, and I think a large reason for that is they’ve done a great job of simplification and branding. One thing that Intel did really well was their product naming, they had their Atom, Pentium/Celeron, Core and Xeon lines. You knew, and could get an idea from the names that atom was for low end, low power, Celeron was low end, Pentium slightly better, core professional and then Xeon was for servers. With AMD, I can’t even remember what most of the names where. “Pheanom”, or “Opertron”? And I don’t even know which level these were intended for. I think with their APU lines, they cleaned a lot of this up with their “A6”, “A8” naming.

One thing Ryzen did is it made it really easy to understand which models do what. You have the Ryzen R3, R5, and R7, and then you have the series so Ryzen 1000, 2000, 3000 for each generation. It makes it easy to know what you want and what model you’re looking for when buying a CPU. It’s still rumored, but AMD’s navi line of GPU’s could be coming out in a few months, and I hope their marketing department does the same thing they did for Ryzen to their GPU line. Because as bad as AMD’s CPUs were in terms of naming, their GPU’s are pretty bad or potentially even worse.

What do I mean by that? The Radeon VII. What the fuck kind of name is that? It’s named “VII” because it’s based on the 7nm process. Well is the “Nano R9” named that because it’s on the 9nm process? You have the RX series, which you have the 570, 580 and 590. Except the 590 is just an over clocked 580. And all of these cards are pretty much overclocked versions of the previous 4xx series. And then you have these other random cards like, “Vega”, “R9” and the “VII” in there. And what the hell came before the RX400 series? Oh right, the Radeon 5000 series (i think). None of this makes any freaking sense. One thing I hope AMD does is find a consistent naming convention for their GPU’s and stick with it.