In what is sure to be a ‘world exclusive’ we can reveal the next-generation graphics architecture coming out of Nvidia could be codenamed Quillian. This follows speculation there will be Ampere and Turing architectures revealed this year.
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The Quillian architecture would be named after Ross Quillian, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. I mean, it’s not going to be, and I freely admit we have no sources to back this up, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the world’s tech media from loudly proclaiming that Nvidia are definitely creating Ampere and Turing GPUs for gaming and cryptography respectively. And most publications are seemingly basing everything on completely unsourced, throw-away lines in solitary pieces from Heise and Reuters. Unless they all know something we don’t…
So who cares if we’re baiting you by making things up? We think a new graphics chip with the GQ100 nomenclature sounds too cool not to be a thing. But then the next Nvidia GPU architecture could just as easily be named Ohm, Shockley, Hamilton, or Johnson. After all, it seems the PC tech media is now engaged in some weird circle jerk of GPU fan fiction, so why not join in?
But one of the reasons for the recent frenzied speculation around the potential Ampere and Turing names is because they do make sense, they are believable. Well, that and because we’re all desperate for new graphics cards in these tough times.
And that’s because Nvidia have historically named their graphics architectures around noted scientists, such as Nikola Tesla, Enrico Fermi, Johannes Kepler, James Clerk Maxwell, Blaise Pascal, and lately Alessandro Volta.
So here’s our favourite potential future Nvidia architectural codenames. Who knows, one of them may even turn out to be real…
Ampere
Named after André-Marie Ampère, a French physicist who gave his name to the official standard measurement of current: the ampere, or amp.
Turing
Named after Alan Turing, a cryptographer most widely known for his work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War to break the Enigma Code, and for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence.
Quillian
Named after Ross Quillian, a specialist in artificial intelligence who is credited with developing the first semantic web. It’s the method AI uses to associate words and concepts together.
Hamilton
Named after Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who lead the a team at the Software Engineering Division of MIT which developed the code which ran the in-flight software for the Apollo space program. And isn’t it about time we had a GPU named after a brilliant lady? Seriously, just check out this image of her next to the mountain of code she and her team developed.
Ohm
Named after Georg Simon Ohm, a German physicist responsible for Ohm’s law and the standard ohm unit of electrical resistance. Though it might actually be a better codename for AMD to use as a rival GPU architecture, y’know ‘the resistance’ and all that…
Johnson
Named after Katherine G. Johnson, an African-American mathematician and NASA numbers whizz who calculated the emergency return trajectories for manned space missions and was a critical part of the Apollo moon landing program.
Shockley
Named after William Shockley, an American physicist whose work at Bell Labs helped develop the transistor. And since future Nvidia GPUs are likely to pack in untold billions of the things that probably makes him worth a thought. Though as a supposed proponent of eugenics maybe not.