Old ATI chips were named Rage. Kaveri seems to be a river in India.... but it would've been much more cooler if it was named Kolaveri, which according to my poor translation skills must mean Rage in Indian (or one of it's dialects - possibly tamil).
You are right! Kaveri is a river in India and Kolaveri does mean something synonymous with Rage or 'intense passion/anger' in colloquial tamil. Only tamil is not a dialect of Indian. An interesting tidbit. There are hundreds of languages spoken in different parts of India.
From wikipedia,
Individual mother tongues in India number several hundreds;[9] the 1961 census recognized 1,652[10] (SIL Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000
All that aside, I'm curious to know about the origin of this name.
Yes. Kaveri is indeed a river in southern India. AMD has used more river names like Kabini (another river in southern India), Temash, Llano, Desna etc. for their APU chipsets.
The words may be etymologically related. The word kaveri has two suggested etymologies; the first is that it's originally a variation of toveri (which is more formal; also means "friend", but has a leftist connotation, like "comrade"). The latter is fairly straightforward loan from the Russian товарищ (tovarištš), which is probably closely related to the Bulgarian aver. Interestingly, the ka- in kaveri may originate from the Swedish kamrat, quite clearly related to the English "comrade".
The other hypothesis is that kaveri is from the Yiddish חבֿר (khaver), which is a direct loan from Hebrew.
And then there is the song... :)