The tech industry is rife with innovations and unique products that continue to blow us away with their extraordinary features. This CES, we saw major developments in the monitor front, with new OLED panels and high refresh rates taking displays to the next level. Hardware wasn't neglected either, as we caught a glimpse of Nvidia's new RTX 40-series Super GPUs and AMD Ryzen 8000G APUs during the four-day-long tech conference.

Unfortunately, the tech sector isn't known for its intuitive naming schemes. Quite the contrary. There's a plethora of devices whose names fail to make any sense and can be downright impossible to remember for even the most hardcore computing experts.

5 Monitors

Some monitor names are longer than entire license plates

If you've ever shopped for a new monitor, only to have a headache after going through hundreds of displays with bizarre names akin to something created by an AI, then you're not alone. That said, the seemingly random letters at the end of most monitor names describe their features and specifications… if you can decipher them.

Since there's no unified naming standard among manufacturers, every company has its own nomenclature scheme. Dell tends to put the series name first, followed by the screen size, the year of manufacture, screen resolution, and the features.

Likewise, MSI, HP, and LG have their own set of codes, with each letter having a different meaning than Dell's naming convention. And there's Acer, widely known for its over-the-top naming practices where each monitor has long feature identifiers at the end of its model name.

4 Nvidia GPUs

Team Green used somewhat sensible names until the 10-series

Nvidia's GPU nomenclature was always a bit flawed, but the absurdity of its naming practices became more noticeable after the Pascal lineup. Specifically, the 10-series introduced the terrible convention of using the same names for laptop and desktop chips.

Its successor, the Turing lineup brought RT Cores to the table, which is why Team Green ditched the GTX brand in favor of RTX. For some reason, it was called the 20-series, instead of the 11-series. Nvidia also released a cheaper set of GPUs with the GTX 1600 moniker. This generation also marked the introduction of the Super variants, as if the Ti versions weren't already enough.

The Ampere series, keeping up with Nvidia's newly established tradition of advancing the generation by 10 digits, was called the 30-series. Then there's the current-gen Ada Lovelace series, which has the same names for desktop and laptop GPUs and includes Ti and Super variants. Heck, there's even a Ti SUPER edition of the RTX 4070, because, why not?

3 USB

Revisions, revisions

We've gone from the era of USB Type-A ports to multipurpose USB Type-C connections. But thanks to the constant revisions in the USB naming scheme, it's hard to ascertain the speed of a particular USB device.

The first ever USB interface could transfer data at 12Mbps and was named USB 1.0, before being rebranded to USB 1.1. Soon, USB 2.0 surfaced, bringing faster data transfer speeds of 480Mbps. Its successor, USB 3.0, was released in 2008 and could support a max transfer speed of 5Gbps. The next version of the USB interface was released in 2013, and it doubled the transfer speed. It was named USB 3.1, and this is when the naming scheme started to take a turn for the worse.

For some reason, USB-IF decided to relabel USB 3.0 to USB 3.1 Gen 1, while USB 3.1 was renamed to USB 3.1 Gen 2. The next iteration, USB 3.2, made its debut in 2017, and it was decided that all three USB 3 variants would be rebranded again. USB 3.0 was assigned the title USB 3.2 Gen 1 and the USB 3.1 was labeled USB 3.2 Gen 2. The weirdest name belongs to USB 3.2, as it is now referred to as USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.

USB4, which was released in 2019, had two variants: one that had the same transfer speed of 20Gbps as USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, and another that could transfer data at twice the speed, or 40Gbps. Here's the punchline: despite being the only models in the entire USB family that deserve separate names due to the stark difference in their transfer speed, both are referred to as USB4!

2 AMD desktop graphic cards

Same name, different generations

Over the last three generations, AMD has stuck with the RX "ab00" naming scheme, where "a" represents the generation and "b" is the digit denoting its hierarchy within the family. Simple, right? Well, the issue is that the recent graphics cards share the same names as older GPUs from the HD family, which were released over a decade ago.

Take the last-gen Radeon RX 6750, for example. There's literally a ten-year-old GPU called Radeon HD 6750 which sounds identical to its newer counterpart. To make matters worse, AMD decided to complicate things by adding XT, GRE, and XTX suffixes to the names of its graphics cards. But Team Red's worst offense is the fact that its GPUs bear names that are extremely similar to the newer Ryzen processors. The result? We currently have multiple AMD products with "7900" in their names: the Ryzen 9 7900/X/X3D processors and the Radeon RX 7900 GRE/XT/XTX graphics cards.

1 Laptop CPUs

AMD has its naming scheme backward

Team Red's nomenclature format for the newer desktop processors is surprisingly easy to understand (leaving aside the whole CPUs and GPUs sharing the same names part). Unfortunately, AMD's laptop processor market has some of the most atrocious names of all time.

By now, you must have seen a common trend in processors and desktops: the first number in a product's name specifies its architecture or generation. Going by that analogy, the Ryzen 7020 and 7045 processors should belong to the same generation.

Sadly, logic was thrown out of the window following AMD's Ryzen 7000 laptop chips. For some reason or another, AMD decided to use the second last digit to represent the generation, making it difficult to identify the architecture of Team Red's newer processors with just their names. For example, even though the Ryzen 7 7735HS processor seems to be newer than the Ryzen 5 7645HX, it's actually powered by the older Zen 3 architecture.

Intel couldn't decide on the number of digits in the names

Intel, too, has gone bonkers at naming laptop processors as of late. Following the release of the Alder Lake mobile processors, Intel changed the naming schemes for the HX/HK/H and P/U models.

The former are high-end gaming processors that bear similar names to their desktop counterparts, and the HX, HK, and H suffixes show they're included in a laptop. Unfortunately, Team Blue decided to shorten the number of digits in the P and U series, making it difficult to tell whether the recent 1355U processor belongs to the i7, i5, or the i3 family.

The newer Meteor Lake laptop CPUs take this a step further by only possessing three digits in their names. While segregating them into high-speed H processors and low-power U chips simplifies things, Intel decided to give all the Meteor Lake CPUs the "Core Ultra" designation and even got rid of the iconic "i" branding. To make things worse, the newer CPUs are considered Series 1 processors, so the implication here is that Intel could release another set of CPUs as part of the Meteor Lake generation.

Sadly, many more products qualify for this list

If you've been in the tech industry for long, you'd know this list is far from complete. For one, Apple loves using similar-sounding Plus, Pro, and Max suffixes for high-end iPhones, even though this naming convention makes things a bit complex for newcomers. Motherboard names have also become increasingly difficult to memorize over the last couple of generations, especially with manufacturers following separate nomenclature practices for budget and high-end boards. Then there's the HDMI certification, which has become as confusing as the naming standards used for the USB interface. And the list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to the awful naming conventions that have become prevalent in the tech industry. For monitors, the fix could be as simple as establishing an industry-wide nomenclature standard. On the other hand, the HDMI and USB interfaces ought to be renamed from scratch. One thing's for certain, there needs to be a paradigm shift in the naming schemes adopted by tech products. Otherwise, we're bound to end up with weird names that make less sense than the illogical gibberish created by random string generators.