Why AMD picked the Ryzen name

For years we've known the upcoming processor architecture from AMD as "Zen" so perhaps you're wondering why AMD decided to call the final retail product "Ryzen". There's quite a lot of backstory behind it and I have to admit AMD seems to have made a brilliant choice here if Ryzen lives up to the hype.

Years ago Zen was picked as the codename because of the balance the architecture struck between various aspects of the design. But as PC World reports today, AMD could not use Zen as the final product name because they couldn't trademark Zen.

There are a lot of products in the world that use Zen-related branding, even in the consumer electronics market you have various products like the ASUS ZenFone and the old Creative Zen MP3 player lineup. So trademarking Zen was basically a no-go because it was not strong nor unique enough.

A specialized naming agency came up with "rizon", which is basically "horizon" without the "ho". AMD's executives liked the concept of a platform that takes you to the next horizon of computing, it stuck for some time but AMD marketing executive John Taylor explains it never felt right.

After this AMD's space buffs introduced the "New Horizon" name for the December 2016 webcast where AMD introduced the Zen architecture. The inspiration for this name was the NASA New Horizons space probe that did a flyby study of Pluto and gave us the best photos we have to date of this dwarf planet.

Then one day the company started playing with combinations and spelling variants of "Zen" and "Rizon" and that's how they stumbled upon "Rizen" and "Ryzen":

“That’s got kind of a cool quality about it, too,” Taylor said of the Pluto link. “And so one day, we said, okay, we’ve got this Zen equity, we’ve got this word “rizon” that we kind of like, and we started playing with the spelling.”

One snag: if AMD stuck with “Rizen,” there would be a chance that customers would pronounce it “risen,” invalidating “Zen” and “horizon” in one fell swoop. So executives tried swapping the “i” for the “y,” mocked it up on packaging, then on a processor “lid.”

“And every time we looked at it, we said that word looks fast and it looks like it could be on the side of a spaceship going to Mars,” Taylor said. AMD had a winner.

AMD trademarked the Ryzen name sometime late November and the rest is history.

There's also some significance behind the brushed open circle, this is an enso and it symbolizes further development and growth. Similarly, the Ryzen brand name in the logo uses a newly created font that adheres to Zen principles.