So say you happen to have 2 NICs of the exact same chipset, they will generally show up as the same name, with possibly a different revision in lspci. Normally this is not an issue if you have a server with 4 NICs, generally the eth0 to eth3 appears from left to the right (or right to left on some vendors) so it doesn't take much figuring out.
Generally if you have different chipsets for different NICs, it should be easy to know which one is eth0 or the first NIC in the OS.........