Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:18AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:18AM (#790995) Journal

    a dual core is definitely much faster than a single core, a quad much faster than a dual, etc.

    Not necessarily.

    Here's a blast from the past (2011):

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-fx8150-tested/2 [anandtech.com]

    The "8-core" FX-8150 does not beat the 4-core i7-2600K most of the time, even in the multithreaded workloads that should favor it. In some cases, the 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 beat the Bulldozer chip or came close.

    It's hard to overstate just how bad the Bulldozer launch was. And it's the reason we are hearing about this class action in 2019.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @05:38AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @05:38AM (#791627)

    Now divide the retail price by the performance points in each benchmark. AMD's offerings have always been about more for your money rather than absolute peak performance. You'll also notice that single-threaded performance is not great relative to the 2600K but the gap becomes pretty narrow in multi-threaded tests. Are you going to whip out some quadruple-digit priced Xeons from the same era and go "but muh benchmarks show dat duh Xeons move faster dan duh AMD!" too?

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 25 2019, @06:48AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday January 25 2019, @06:48AM (#791641) Journal

      I was just addressing Runaway's assertion about cores.

      At launch, i7-2600K was $317, FX-8150 was $245. For about 30% more, you got much better single-threaded performance, with the Intel chip reaching 30%, or sometimes even 50-65% on certain benchmarks and games. Throw in a cheaper Intel chip from the time and it would also do well against the "8-core".

      It was far from a slam dunk like Zen tends to be today, and anemic compared to AMD's previous generation chips. Bulldozer was bad, and the bad design choices were only fixed with the arrival of Zen over 5 years later.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 26 2019, @12:02AM

      by toddestan (4982) on Saturday January 26 2019, @12:02AM (#792107)

      One of the problems really was peak performance. Back in those days, AMD really didn't have an answer to Intel's i7. Their very best chips competed with the i5, and it went down from there. Now, it may not be a problem to not have an answer to Intel's ridiculous $1000 Core i7 Extreme chip, but this was the mainstream $250-$300 i7's that were very popular and bought in droves (I have one, typing on it right now). To make it more embarrassing, the top of the line chip from the previous generation was still nipping at its heels even though it was now a couple of years old. Those weren't good days for AMD.