AMD changed its Zen chip architecture’s name to Ryzen to provide a defensible trademark, crossing a space probe with Japanese Buddhist calligraphy.
As John Taylor, corporate vice president of marketing for AMD, describes it, AMD was between a rock and a hard place. Mike Clark, an engineering fellow at AMD who led the Zen architecture development, had dubbed the architecture “Zen” for the balance it struck between various aspects of the design. Fans who had followed Zen’s development would buttonhole AMD execs and rave about the Zen name: “‘I love Zen…there’s something about it I’m just connecting with,’ they’d say,” Taylor said.
The problem was that AMD simply couldn’t trademark Zen. Under U. S. law, trademarks need to be “strong” and unique, and there was already a wealth of Zen-named products out there, even among AMD’s own customers (like Asus and its ZenFone ). So AMD had to look elsewhere for inspiration.
Like most major companies, AMD works with specialized naming agencies—yes, they exist—specifically to build a roster of future, trademarkable brand names.
“And so they had some things in the bucket, I guess, one of which was to take the word ‘horizon’ and remove the ‘ho’ from ‘horizon’ and spell it ‘rizon,’” Taylor said. “For some reason, that just stuck with people a little bit, but never quite felt right. But we really liked the concept of this as a platform that was designed to take you to the next horizon of computing.
