According to persistently circulating lately rumors, the new Navi-generation AMD video cards, which are expected to be announced on Monday at the opening of Computex 2019, will be called Radeon RX 3080 and RX 3070. with such model numbers, it will be possible to effectively oppose the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs, the older versions of which are named GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2070.
In other words, AMD is once again going to pull the same trick as in the processor market, where Ryzen processors are divided into Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 subclasses similar to Core i7, i5 and i3, and chipsets have numbers a hundred higher in relation to Intel platforms. the same class. Obviously, such parasitism on the names of competitors' products brings certain dividends, and some buyers, looking at digital indices, really change their choice in favor of options with higher numbers on the boxes. Therefore, AMD's desire to use the names Radeon RX 3080 and RX 3070 is understandable.
But if Intel treated such marketing ploys quite condescendingly, pretending that they simply did not notice them, in the case of NVIDIA, such a trick could promise certain problems for AMD. The fact is that in early May, NVIDIA lawyers submitted an application to the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office - an agency that protects intellectual property in the European Union) for the registration of trademarks "3080", "4080" and "5080", at least least in the computer graphics market. In the case of a positive decision on this application, the company may be able to block the use of such numerical indices in homogeneous products of competitors in the 28 countries of the European Union.
It is curious that NVIDIA has never resorted to registering numerical indices before, protecting only brands like “GeForce RTX” and “GeForce GTX”. Now the company is obviously not a little concerned about the possibility of "missing" their traditional numbers. Moreover, NVIDIA representatives even developed a certain media activity and gave a detailed comment to the PCGamer website that the right to use the numbers 3080, 4080 and 5080 rightfully belongs to them: “GeForce RTX 2080 appeared after the GeForce GTX 1080. Obviously, we want protect trademarks that continue the sequence.”
Of course, NVIDIA's attempt to register the numbers raises the quite natural question of whether it's legal at all. In the history of the computer industry, there have already been cases when one of the manufacturers of computer equipment has attempted to register trademarks from numbers. For example, at one time Intel tried to obtain exclusive rights to use the numbers "386", "486" and "586" in the name of the processors, but in the end it did not succeed.
However, the registration of numerical trademarks is quite acceptable even under US law. In addition, NVIDIA has filed an application with the European Office, the rules of which explicitly state that the European trademark "may consist of any signs, in particular words or drawings, letters, numbers, colors, shapes of goods and their packaging or sounds." In other words, there really is a chance that NVIDIA will be able to get exclusive rights to use the numbers 3080, 4080 and 5080 in the names of video cards.
Will AMD have time to respond to such a turn? We'll find out the day after tomorrow.
Source: 3dnews.ru