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posted by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the class-excavation dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NewNic on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:01PM (1 child)

    by NewNic (6420) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:01PM (#790887) Journal

    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
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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:10AM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:10AM (#790989) Journal

    No one would dispute that they are 4-cylinder engines.

    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.