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: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:50PM (2 children)
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.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @03:30PM (1 child)
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
Don't answer that, I'm guessing your response will add nothing to my knowledge.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves