Well, I hope I'm not muddying the waters by jumping into this
discussion, and I don't want to step on anybody's creative toes either (at
least, not hard enough to pinch).
First off, I'd argue against Deca. It's too close to a recording
company, and also a British radio navigation system.
During a previous thread on this subject, I suggested that actual
products should have part numbers, and not just names. The part numbers
should have a systematic structure that nails down exactly which optional
features are installed. With only names, trying to keep straight all the
basic product types and their factory options would get unwieldy and
confusing really fast.
So, we might choose one single name for an entire product family to
create strong name recognition, and then combine it with a part number to
identify the specific item. This approach could also help a lot with the
industrial sector of the potential customer base; it feels more adult.
Somebody in this thread suggested a name with "Graf" in it. I like
that as a syllable. It's a good-sounding Greek word, and has a clear and
obvious connection to graphics hardware. (It also happens to be a German
title of nobility.)
Opso carries the open source idea, but it's a little long, and
doesn't feel euphonious to my ear. In previous discussions, I suggested
"os" or "ios" to mean the same thing, where the s can connote either source,
specification, or standard, with intentional ambiguity. The i might mean
either industrial or part of I/O, again with intentional ambiguity.
Combining these ideas, a couple of possible product family names
would be:
Grafios
Grafos
Similarly,
OSGraf
Within any of these character strings, it's also possible to play
with capitalization, and I don't think it would sound too much like kid
stuff.
GrafiOS
GrafiOs
GrafioS
oSGraf
OsGraf
Along the same lines,
GrafiCard
OpenGraf
Another thing that might happen over time is that the architecture
could evolve, without changing beyond recognition. So product sub-families
implementing different derivatives of the ancestral architecture might be
called
GrafiOS-1
GrafiOS-2
and so on.
> > The name is the face for selling a product for the first-time-purchaser of
> > the brand. Then quality kicks in, support, drivers, availability.. bla
> > bla...
I think this is a primary argument for picking just one name. That
maximizes recognition value for the whole family of potential products.
> Liberator
> Emancipator
> Barbarian
> Rolling Thunder
> Infinite Justice
Might offend Moslems.
> Badger
> Steamroller
> Violator
> FoxGrafx
Played with this, above.
> Unity
> Harmony
Interesting implications. Hmmm...
> Coolinator
> Coolatron
> Quicksilver
> (Hey, Quicksolver would be a great name for a high-end math app.)
> Paradigm
It's the name of a semiconductor company.
> Singularity
> Feronia
> Ninja
> Duellon
> 42
> Inari
What bothers me about most of these is that they sound like they're
cooked up by marketers who don't have a lot of respect for the intelligence
and maturity of their audience. I tend not to give much credibility to
products with names like that. OGP isn't trying to imitate ATI and nVidia,
it's doing serious things that they're not even interested in attempting.
In this category, I'd lean more toward names like:
Visualizer
Clear Image
Clarity
> Heleon
> Neneon
> Argeon
> Krypteon
> Xeneon
or Grafeon?
Now, then, the question of product part numbers...
Boards and chips are fundamentally different classes of products,
sold to different customers. So their part number structures can be
altogether different.
For boards, I'd suggest a family root number tied to the bare board,
followed by a coded dash number string to identify the options. Each board
type would probably have a different set of installable options, therefore
its dash number structure would be unique to its own product family. (No
fair trying to anticipate all the options that will occur in all the
product families Traversal will ever market; that way lies madness.)
The root number structure should probably begin with 2 or 3 letters,
chosen mnemonically. They can derive from either the product family name or
the manufacturer's name. The former is more common.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the architecture family name
is GrafiOS, the first series of board products (the FPGA development boards)
could be the GR1 or GS1 line. Since there are going to be different board
layouts for different buses, the root numbers might go something like:
GS1A- =AGP
GS1P- =PCI
GS1E- =PCIe
I don't know what the board stuffing options will actually be, but
let's assume for the moment that VRAM space is variable and the ICs come in
either commercial or industrial temp range. Then the part number for a PCI
board with 128 MB of video RAM and all industrial-grade chips would be:
GS1P-128-I
Going by the same sort of number structure, the first production
board family with ASICs would be the GS2 series. It would surely have a
different set of options. For instance, if separate precision DACs are an
option, a PCI version with 256 MB of VRAM, separate DACs, and commercial
grade parts could be:
GS2P-256D-C
and it would be described in ads and sales literature as a:
Traversal GrafiOS GS2P-256D-C
ICs, on the other hand, usually have a part number structure
consisting of the manufacturer-specific prefix, a number unique to the
chip's features and logical function, possibly some fields for the
performance grade, a package identifier, and a temperature grade. This is
pretty much standard throughout the semiconductor industry. I don't know
how a unique number string gets assigned; there might be somebody at a trade
association who does that. Tim, I could ask around a little if you want me
to investigate that question.
Let's assume that Traversal gets dibs on 26031 as the root number
for the first ASIC with a GrafiOS architecture. (Maybe Traversal could get
a much shorter number, since the number of IC designs it's likely to crank
out is small.) A Traversal-brand commercial-grade part in a PQFP (will it go
in a PQFP? I dunno.) could then be marked:
Tr26031QC
Of course, I don't mean any of these part number examples to be
taken literally. They're only intended to brainstorm the types of number
structures that might be considered.
One thing I'd be really careful about is using the letters O and I
in a part number. I've seen them cause endless confusion in purchasing
departments and stock systems. They're OK if surrounded by letters on both
sides, or perhaps at the very beginning if followed by other letters.
Similarly, a zero shouldn't be used in the middle of a string of letters.
The basic idea I'm throwing up for consideration is to pick a single
name for the whole product family, and feature-coded part numbers for the
individual products.
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