NVIDIA and Dish Networkan American satellite television, they face each other in court for the brand”Hoppers“. Hopper is rumored to be the name of the architecture behind the Next-gen NVIDIA GPUs that we will see on board the accelerators intended for the HPC world. Dish Network, at the same time, uses the Hopper brand for some of its devices, in particular those intended for satellite reception.
NVIDIA, confident that the two companies operate in entirely different industries, filed the trademark in 2019″Nvidia Hopper“. Dish Network, however, does not seem to agree and has decided to challenge trademark registration.
Grace Murray Hopper
The procedure, according to what has been reconstructed by Tom’s Hardware United States, began on April 23, 2021, when Dish Network filed its opposition against NVIDIA for registration of the “NVIDIA Hopper” trademark with the USPTO (the United States Patent and Trademark Office). Dish Network claims that the NVIDIA brand will be confused with their own – the company actively uses Hopper, Hopper Go, Hopper Duo, Hopper Plus, and some variants.
According to NVIDIA, Hopper is nothing more than a tribute to Grace Murray Hopper, American pioneer of computer programming (among other things, she developed COBOL and the first compiler). Double tribute, however, since NVIDIA announced the arrival of an ARM CPU called Grace in 2023.
The legal battle could probably end with an amicable agreement, but the two companies have been negotiating a deal since May 2021 and have yet to strike the right balance. However, those months in which a stay of proceedings was requested are about to end.
“Judicial activity, such as the pre-trial process, is expected to automatically resume on February 22, 2022 if either party does not agree to settle or files another motion to stay proceedings,” writes Tom’s Hardware. Time isn’t on NVIDIA’s side, or so it’s rumored, given that Hopper GPUs are set to debut this year (GTC 2022 is expecting a keynote on March 22…).
Rumor has it that the Hopper H100 GPU will be manufactured by TSMC in 5 nanometers and could rely on a project MCM with multiple die on packagein line with what AMD saw with the Instinct 200-series accelerators. ) from TSMC.
On the consumer GPU side, those that can be identified as GeForce RTX 4000, NVIDIA would have the “Ada Lovelace” solutions in the pipeline (although there is uncertainty about the official name: Ada Lovelace, Ada or Lovalace ) also produced at 5 nanometers by TSMC and expected by the end of the year. At present, there is no litigation regarding these possible trademarks.