Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide
A class-action lawsuit against AMD claiming false advertising over its "eight core" FX processors has been given the go-ahead by a California judge.
US district judge Haywood Gilliam last week rejected [PDF] AMD's claim that "a significant majority" of people understood the term "core" the same way it did as "not persuasive."
What tech buyers imagine represents a core when it comes to processors would be a significant part of such a lawsuit, the judge noted, and so AMD's arguments were "premature."
The so-called "eight core" chips contain four Bulldozer modules, the lawsuit notes, and these "sub-processors" each contain a pair of instruction-executing CPU cores. So, four modules times two CPU cores equals, in AMD's mind, eight CPU cores.
And here's the sticking point: these two CPU cores, within a single Bulldozer module, share caches, frontend circuitry, and a single floating point unit (FPU). These shared resources cause bottlenecks that can slow the processor, it is claimed.
The plaintiffs, who sued back in 2015, argue that they bought a chip they thought would have eight independent processor cores – the advertising said it was the "first native 8-core desktop processor" – and paid a premium for that.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:59PM (4 children)
I'm really torn about this. On the one hand I agree with you. AMD was very forthcoming with details of their architecture, and anybody who cared already knew that there was shared FPU/etc. Moreover, the average person has no idea what a "core" is at all. (I'm pretty technically savvy, and even I am a bit nebulous on what exactly a "core" is.)
On the other hand, I still remember all the pointed postings on anandtech and other technical sites with people saying "careful, they may have 8 'cores' but they still only have 4 FPUs so you'll be bottle-necked on that" (with the response that FPUs aren't used that often... and the re-response saying for graphical rendering/etc...). Moreover, do we really want to force consumers to know everything?
As a car analogy, imagine if Ford announced a new V8 car, but the valves in that car were only 1/2 the diameter and used 1/4 the gasoline (and provide 1/4 the power) of a traditional valve. They are very forthcoming of this new "fuel saving" design, albeit not in their top-line advertising. Would it be viable to have a lawsuit against them for false advertising?
I really don't know.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:07PM (1 child)
I recall AMD marketing being very out of touch when it came to Bulldozer, making big promises but not delivering. Which caused a lot of outrage, ridicule about the "modules", and destroyed AMD in some market segments.
By contrast, AMD promised a 40% IPC with Zen and delivered something like a 52% increase. And the 8 cores were real that time.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:11PM
*40% IPC increase
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by NewNic on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:01PM (1 child)
To make your analogy very real and accurate:
Britiesh Leyland "B" series engines, as installed in the MGA and MGB, have a header that has siamesed ports. They have 4 cylinders, but the head only has two intake ports and 3 exhaust ports, and the intake is fed from two carburettors (except for late model MGBs, which had a single carburettor). No one would dispute that they are 4-cylinder engines.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:10AM
I don't know about that. In the U.S., there are some folks that did not like the arrangement of the eight cores in AMD FX processors, and so are claiming that the eight cores are not eight cores, but are something else because of the way they are arranged*.
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* Because of something called the Commutative Property [purplemath.com], arranging things in a different way is not capable of changing the fundamental number of things.