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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 requerdanos on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:17AM (2 children)
For the 8008, the answer is 0, but it has a core.
For the 8086, the answer is 0, but it has a core.
For the 8088, the answer is 0, but it has a core.
For the 80186, the answer is 0, but it has a core.
For the 80386, the answer is 0, but it has a core.
For the 80486SX, the answer is 0, but no sane person would argue that it doesn't have a core.
Floating point historically is nothing but an extra added bonus, to say nothing of SIMD!
You can't count cores by counting the abilities of things that are not located in the cores.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 25 2019, @08:09AM (1 child)
And the things you claim are not located on the cores *are* located on the cores, but are modular - the integer ALUs are just as modular as the FPU units, would you claim that the integer parts are just as much not part of the "core"?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 26 2019, @12:27AM
Furthermore those examples are applying modern terminology to historical examples. I had never heard of the term "core" as we know it today until the first "dual core" chips showed up on the market in the 2000's and we needed a term to describe these new chips that had more than one processing unit in the same package. No one referred to their 486 as a single "core" system, it was a single "CPU" system, unless of course you were made of money and had a dual "CPU" system. By the time the "core" terminology came about, the FPU had long been considered as an integral part of the processing unit and thus what was considered a "core".