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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: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:50PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:50PM (#790926) Homepage
    I remember 8086s too (but owned a 68K-based box which would shit on an 8086 from a great height), and even remember when you could buy a Weitek coprocessor as a radical alternative to the x87, so my opinions are based on the same inputs as yours.

    Truth in marketting I'm no expert on, but I know that IP rights have the concept of an idiot in a hurry, and whether a reasonable man would consider their marketting materials as implying that there are 8 FPUs, and that FPUs are nowadays an intrinsic part of the CPU, are sensible questions to ask. To be honest, I think AMD will get away with it, as they could probably roll out a "but one 'core' never had identically one 'FPU', as it often had 2 or 3 ALUs doing the actual processing" type argument and even "so we actually have 12 floating point computation modules on this 8-core CPU" as their conclusion.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @03:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @03:30PM (#791248)

    I know that IP rights have the concept of an idiot in a hurry,

    And here we have an example of why "IP rights" is a loaded term intentionally used to confuse multiple unrelated areas of law. The moron in a hurry standard is a test which applies to determine whether trademark infringement occurred. Nobody is making a trademark argument here.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 25 2019, @08:11AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday January 25 2019, @08:11AM (#791665) Homepage
      Precisely what about my post gave you the impression that anything that you've said adds anything to my knowledge?

      Don't answer that, I'm guessing your response will add nothing to my knowledge.
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