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posted by martyb on Thursday August 29 2019, @10:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the eight-times-one-is-not-equal-to-four-times-two dept.

AMD agrees to cough up $35-a-chip payout over eight-core Bulldozer advertising fiasco

AMD has agreed to pay purchasers of its FX Bulldozer processors a total of $12.1m to settle a four-year false advertising lawsuit.

Considering the number of processors sold and assuming a 20 per cent take-up by eligible purchasers, that works out to $35 a chip, the preliminary agreement argues: a figure that is "significantly more than 50 per cent of the value of their certified claims had they prevailed at trial."

It's a good deal, the agreement [PDF] explains, because of the "risks and expenses that further litigation would pose in this case."

The chip giant advertised its processors as being the "first native 8-core desktop processor" and charged a premium for it. But a significant number of those purchasers were then surprised to find that the chip did not contain eight fully independent, fully featured processing units but rather four Bulldozer modules that each contain a pair of fully fledged instruction-executing CPU cores.

A final nail in the module coffin.

Also at AnandTech and Guru3D.

Previously: AMD Sued by Customer Over Misrepresentation of "Multicore"
When is a CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 30 2019, @12:01AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 30 2019, @12:01AM (#887560)

    I'm really conflicted about this situation. On the one hand:

    Buy a burger, guaranteed $5 every time(*). *Offer not available in New York City.

    Well, obviously it's not available in New York City, and it's stupid for anybody in New York City to complain it's false advertising.

    Buy a burger, guaranteed $5 every time. (Unnoted: "Burger" refers to a plastic mobile phone speaker mount.

    They are clearly co-opting a commonly understood terminology and this is blatant false advertising.

    For this Bulldozer case, I'm not sure which side of the spectrum it falls. I've heard compelling arguments that, "technical people know that cores are a technical thing which does not include a floating point calculator..." but not sure how much of that is spin.

    .
    .
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    Also conflicted... does anybody know how much of the settlement goes to consumers and how much is going to the lawyers? And if the payout is going to be cash or some other non-cash compensation?

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Friday August 30 2019, @01:23AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 30 2019, @01:23AM (#887593) Journal

    If you look at the marketing pre-Bulldozer, to the reaction after launch and reviews, it's clear that it was a disaster and a very misleading use of the term "core(s)".

    Plus in this AMD case, we have yet to hear how much the lawyers want for their services. The agreement says the lawyers haven’t even discussed how much they are going to pay one another at this point but have kindly offered to “limit” their fees to no more than 30 per cent of the settlement fund - so $3.63m.

    According to the settlement, class members will get their money in the form of a check which they must cash within 90 days. Not a coupon for $X off a new Ryzen or anything like that.

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