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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:02AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:02AM (#790954)

    Well, it just goes to show, computer slavery should be abolished!

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