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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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.
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:30PM (2 children)
What did they expect performance-wise 8x vs single core? I don't have that cpu but it was surely better than 4x but less than 8x. There is always going to be some overhead when utilizing multiple cores.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:50AM (1 child)
And that leads to an obvious defence for AMD, use Amdahl's Law to determine whether 8-core performance is within the acceptable range vs. 4-core.
Of course, if it's way outside the range, then they probably don't want to bring that one up.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:22AM
I'd think that would depend a lot on the scheduler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:30PM (8 children)
Like having 5G mobile service.
Or 33 and a half megabytes of memory (33,554,432 bytes, otherwise once known as 32 Megabytes, or 2 ^ 25 bytes).
Meet the new definition of "marketing" cores.
Remember how marketing ruined the entire meaning of the term "relational database" back in the late 80s?
What other technical terms with well established meanings became meaningless due to marketing and advertisements?
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:12PM (6 children)
Cloud enabled
Scalable
Modern displays with refresh rates in Hertz
"Hacker"
Any more?
(Score: 3, Funny) by BsAtHome on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:23PM
Please stop! I'm going to fill-up my bullshit bingo card prematurely.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:12AM (3 children)
Please update your response to include "synergy" and "game changer".
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:56AM (2 children)
And don't forget "leverage".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:22AM (1 child)
Seriously. No blockchain?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:46PM
It's called Crypto now.
They talk about "crypto" and don't realize that word already has an established meaning predating digital currency.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @11:44PM
One of my favorites was "Contrast Ratio" on monitors. I remember seeing displays proclaiming 10,000,000:1 and other nonsense until finally everyone realized the numbers were meaningless and stopped paying attention to them.
"AI" is a big one now. One of the products I work on suddenly has "AI". That's not to say that some of the things it does isn't kind of a rudimentary AI, but all the things that marketing loves to talk up now it's actually done for several years. But 5 years ago it wasn't sexy to call that stuff "AI" and today it is.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:51PM
There needs to be standard organizations that define such terms. Then when someone uses the term 'core' they can say 'ISO standard Core" or whatever organization is being referred to. So that we are all on the same page and we can better compare two different products from two different companies and know they are talking about the same thing. Then if someone says "8 ISO standard cores" and that's not true we can go to court with the definition of a core as the ISO (or whatever organization) defines it and make comparisons with what's being sold.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:32PM (24 children)
I dunno about Judge Gilliam, but at the time, I was building a PC and selected the FX-8300. I didn't know exactly what AMD meant by "8 cores" in the technical sense, other than "there's 8 things in there that might be at the center of a processor", which there are, because there's different ways to connect and arrange them. So I looked on AMD's website and saw how they arranged their 8 cores. And still decided to buy the chip, which was cheap and very very fast for the time and for the money.
The point I seek to make is not that it's "totally 8 cores", but rather that it was no secret how the 8 cores were arranged, and the chip had sufficient benchmarks published to demonstrate its performance. Anyone who bought one either knew what they were buying, or didn't care.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:54PM (17 children)
When I bought my FX-8350, one of the features that excited me (besides the superior cost/performance vs a comparable Intel processor) was that, where Intel's processors were pitched as quad-core with hyperthreading, my AMD FX processor didn't fake 8 with 4 cores + hyperthreading, but provided an actual 8 cores. Are they now admitting they lied?
I stand by my selection and definitely received better value for my money than if I'd bought a comparable Core i7 processor at the time, but if AMD lied there should certainly be some repercussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:00PM (1 child)
RTFA'd. It sounds like the description is consistent with what I remember when I bought my AMD FX processors. Eight cores, as advertised. Not necessarily optimally configured and sharing FPUs between pairs of cores, but definitely 8, not like Intel's hokey 4+hyperthreading.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @08:26PM
I knew what the FX processors were when I bought mine. I agree that the description is consistent to what I knew back then. I'm very happy with mine, and I still use an 8 core and a 4 core FX today, along with a Ryzen.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:08PM (13 children)
No, they absolutely have 8 physical cores - those cores just don't each have their own dedicated cache and FPU.
For reference, most 386 CPUs had *no* on-board cache or FPU (a.k.a math coprocessor), those were implemented in separate chips that a motherboard manufacturer could choose to include (or not). The 486 included some on-chip cache, but still mostly had no FPU (as I recall that was one of the big distinctions between the SX and DX lines in both chips). And I don't think anyone is going to argue that they were "zero-core" processors.
Every usage of "CPU core" I've encountered basically amounts to "smallest unit that (with access to external RAM) is capable of running a computer program. That usually means integer processing and conditional branching, and not much else. Though specific designs may make for much more sophisticated cores with caching, floating-point and/or vector processing capabilities, etc.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:34PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:14PM (3 children)
I mostly agree, and for sure many of technology's terms are not well defined, or fall into misuse. A minor (but annoying) example is hard disk sizes where 1 GB ≠ 1024^3 , but rather = 1,000,000,000. Sigh.
Just to clarify, the 80486 DX has both cache and math coprocessor. The SX has cache but no math coprocessor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Disagree) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:24AM (2 children)
The hard disk manufacturers are correct. Giga- is an SI prefix that strictly refers to 10^9. SI, IEEE, and IEC standards have been existence for a while now that clarify this. 1 GB (gigabyte) is indeed 10^9 bytes. If you want to refer to 1024^3, that's 1 GiB (Gibibyte).
It's true that there was loose usage of the SI prefixes early on where the error didn't matter as much (e.g., 1024 vs. 1000). But that use has been deprecated by standards organizations for at least 15 years or so now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:12PM (1 child)
Since I've been modded as "disagree," I'll just note that almost all most post is just factual. The only revision I would make is the first sentence should say "The hard disk manufacturers are correct NOW." It's true there were lawsuits and disagreement years ago, but the official standards organizations have weighed in and clarified the correct usage.
Note that usually I'm happy to accept changes in language when usage changes decidedly. But we are not dealing with "language" in the normal sense here. The entire point of the SI system is to establish standards. The early use in the computing industry to call 1024 bytes a "kilobyte" because 1024 is close to 1000 was a deviation from the definition of the prefix. It took hold mostly when computing was still a niche industry.
The SI system was put in place in part to avoid specifically these kinds of deviations in meaning regarding units. Before the metric system, you not only had regional differences in unit definitions (e.g., a "foot" could mean a somewhat different length in different countries, or even in different cities), but also different unit definitions by industry (e.g., an "ounce" of gold could be different from an "ounce" of water, and a "plumber's ounce" might be different from a "wine merchant's ounce").
The computing industry appropriated the SI prefixes and attempted this very type of redefinition to fit their purposes. It's of course reasonable to have multiples of 2 used in computing for units. It is, however, against the very rationale of the metric system to have a deviation from definitions in a particular industry. (Actually, not even a whole industry -- it's not like "giga-" in "gigahertz" means 1024^3. It was basically only a deviation for the unit of storage space and sometimes data transfer rate.)
I'll be the first one to agree that terms like "gibibyte" sound silly. But it's very reasonable to make the distinction in these units. And I believe Mac OS and Linux now make the GB/GiB distinction clearly and following the standards. Windows may be the only outlier that actually still measures hard disk space using the (inaccurate) KB/MB/GB/TB definition of powers of 2 -- though I haven't used Windows regularly in a few years, so I don't know.
I'm surprised when these disagreements arise on tech forums, because arguing in favor of the 1 GB = 1024^3 definition is like arguing in favor of some other weird parochial measurement unit, like the U.S. should stick to pounds and feet. Such an attitude is usually condemned in places like this. Actually, it's a bit worse, since the SI prefixes are being misappropriated. It would be kind of like the U.S. "adopting" the kilogram, but simply defining it to be 2 pounds "because it's close enough, and it suits us better to use a unit that's a whole multiple of a unit we're already using." Such an error would be within 10%, which is approximately the error present in the TB definition.
Anyhow, we can disagree about what should be the standard measurement unit (GB or GiB), but equating them or pretending that GB means GiB flies in the face of reasonable standards for measurement usage.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday January 25 2019, @08:30AM
I surely did not downmod you, and rarely do to anyone (only the very obvious trolls). I could discuss my dislike of the mod systems but that would be offtopic tome.
I have hopefully intelligent thoughts but it's extremely late where I am and anything I write will tomorrow appear scattered to my then rested brain.
But I will say that my immediate reaction to your post was going to be to mention the "K" and "M" in both hard disk and RAM sizing. As far as I know, in RAM sizing, "G" really does = 1024^3. I'll have to check in my IT museum and see how they sized hard drives long ago, but I'm pretty sure I'll find that "M" is 1024^2.
For the record, I have great disdain for heated discussion, esp. this type. But I will point out: you mentioned the adoption of "K" meaning 1024, but you didn't disprove it, and it (K equaling 1024) kind of undermines your GiB argument.
My thoughts / feeling: when "K" was adopted to mean 1024 in the computing world, and later "M", I and so many others thought "G" would naturally follow as 1024^3, _especially_ since the prefix "giga" is generally only used in technical / scientific parlance.
I'm writing too much and I'm too tired. I have much more to say when rested. Bottom lines are: I and most people have been okay with "K", "M", "G", "T", "P", etc., all being powers of 2 when used in reference to computer / data storage. We all (well, most of us) felt cheated by big-business tycoons when they demoted hard disk "G" to mean 1,000,000,000. It just seemed a bit too convenient and certainly disingenuous. But most of us have accepted it and moved on with life, not sweating the details. :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:40PM (2 children)
It's quite a bit more complicated than that!
Intel released the 80386 in 1985, with no FPU, and they released the (separate) 80387 FPU in 1987.
In 1988 they released the 80386SX which had a 16-bit data bus to reduce board complexity. The normal 80387 is not compatible so they released the 80387SX to work with this variant of the processor. In an effort to reduce confusion between their product offerings, the original 80386 design (still with no FPU) is now called the 80386DX.
Late 1989 Intel released the 80486DX. This was the first x86 offering from Intel with an integrated FPU.
In 1991 AMD releases the Am386DX which, like the Intel 386 has no integrated FPU. At this time FPU performance mattered only for pretty niche applications and this processor ended up competing directly against Intel's early 486 offerings since (other than floating point) this still performed pretty well and was much cheaper.
In response, and perhaps due to early production problems with the integrated FPU, Intel subsequently releases the 80486SX. This is exactly the same die as the 80486DX with the FPU present, but disabled (later respins do remove the FPU completely to save die area). It is sold at a lower cost to compete with the AMD offerings.
Then in a bit of hilarity Intel releases the 80487SX which is also exactly the same design as the 80486DX, but an extra pin is added to the package so it does not fit in the same socket. Motherboards that accept this version work by completely disabling the "486SX" and then the "487SX" does everything. It should also be possible to remove the extra pin to fit the 487SX into the regular socket.
(Score: 1) by Guppy on Thursday January 24 2019, @05:11AM
Also the "486DLC" processors from Cyrix and IBM. Physically compatible with the 386DX socket (and usually drop-in compatible, but not always), it was a mix of 386 and 486 features, plus a small block of L1 cache that 386 processors lacked. And no math co-processor, but compatible with the 387DX. For a time, they offered really good price/performance value.
There was also a 486SLC, physically compatible with the 386SX socket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:25AM
Had an Olivetti with the 486DX. Best machine I ever had. My mom threw it out... and she still denies having thrown out the Vic-20.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:53AM (4 children)
Thank you for the reminder. It helps to settle the issue in my own mind. That doesn't mean it will help to settle the issue in court though. I side with AMD here - a dual core is definitely much faster than a single core, a quad much faster than a dual, etc.
There is some danger here that marketing may have used misleading language somewhere that has put AMD's teat in the wringer. Legal beagles can do strange things with language when they want to, and marketing is no better.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:18AM (3 children)
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]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @05:38AM (2 children)
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
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
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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:41PM
TL/DR: It's complicated.
In a full core, you have the instruction decoder/dispatcher assigning work to a full set of integer and floating point execution units. In hyperthreading, you have two decoders dispatching different threads of execution to a single set of integer and floating point units.
On that AMD processor, you have 2 dispatchers dispatching to 2 sets of integer units but just one set of floating point units. It is really half way between the two extremes.
How useful that is depends on the workload.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:57PM
The chip layout block diagrams were public, as were the various benchmarks and reviews, and there's always going to be shared elements, at some point - especially on the IO side of things. I don't think it's AMD's fault if they didn't do their homework, especially if they got bitten by the shared FPU for an FPU heavy workload, or the shared cache for a CPU heavy one. Besides, by that point the number of cores, clock speed, cache sizes, etc. were all just a soup of mostly meaningless numbers anyway. If you weren't buying based on the bang per buck of performance benchmarks for the kinds of tasks you were buying a given chip for, and ideally doing those tests yourself using actual real-world dataset, then you were doing it wrong.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:59PM (4 children)
I'm really torn about this. On the one hand I agree with you. AMD was very forthcoming with details of their architecture, and anybody who cared already knew that there was shared FPU/etc. Moreover, the average person has no idea what a "core" is at all. (I'm pretty technically savvy, and even I am a bit nebulous on what exactly a "core" is.)
On the other hand, I still remember all the pointed postings on anandtech and other technical sites with people saying "careful, they may have 8 'cores' but they still only have 4 FPUs so you'll be bottle-necked on that" (with the response that FPUs aren't used that often... and the re-response saying for graphical rendering/etc...). Moreover, do we really want to force consumers to know everything?
As a car analogy, imagine if Ford announced a new V8 car, but the valves in that car were only 1/2 the diameter and used 1/4 the gasoline (and provide 1/4 the power) of a traditional valve. They are very forthcoming of this new "fuel saving" design, albeit not in their top-line advertising. Would it be viable to have a lawsuit against them for false advertising?
I really don't know.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:07PM (1 child)
I recall AMD marketing being very out of touch when it came to Bulldozer, making big promises but not delivering. Which caused a lot of outrage, ridicule about the "modules", and destroyed AMD in some market segments.
By contrast, AMD promised a 40% IPC with Zen and delivered something like a 52% increase. And the 8 cores were real that time.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:11PM
*40% IPC increase
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NewNic on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:01PM (1 child)
To make your analogy very real and accurate:
Britiesh Leyland "B" series engines, as installed in the MGA and MGB, have a header that has siamesed ports. They have 4 cylinders, but the head only has two intake ports and 3 exhaust ports, and the intake is fed from two carburettors (except for late model MGBs, which had a single carburettor). No one would dispute that they are 4-cylinder engines.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:10AM
I don't know about that. In the U.S., there are some folks that did not like the arrangement of the eight cores in AMD FX processors, and so are claiming that the eight cores are not eight cores, but are something else because of the way they are arranged*.
------
* Because of something called the Commutative Property [purplemath.com], arranging things in a different way is not capable of changing the fundamental number of things.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:39PM (4 children)
Siamese twins are still called twins and considered separate individuals - and their being conjoined usually slows them down quite a bit also. So why should siamese CPU cores be treated any different just because they're joined at the cache?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:59PM (1 child)
What if one (two) of the jurors is a siamese twin? Do they count as one or two jurors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:13AM
You'll know when they give you the finger(s).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:28PM (1 child)
If you bought two slaves and got siam. twins, you'd have been cheated.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:02AM
Well, it just goes to show, computer slavery should be abolished!
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:46PM
an explanation of different types of promises [smh.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Shire on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:49PM (16 children)
In the server market it's not at all uncommon to have multiple cpu's which have to share resources with each other. They're still refered to by the total number of cores.
For example, if I have a server that contains two hex core xeons, the server is still refered to as having 12 cores despite the fact that all system memory is not directly addressable by both cores. If that server has 128gb of ram then each processor only has direct access to 64gb of ram, to get at the other 64gb requires use of the bus to access the memory under control of the second processor. No one would call this a 6 core shared memory server. It's 12 cores.
This is exactly what's going on with the AMD 8 core - the two Bulldozer cores are sharing the cache bus. There are 8 cores. This isn't HyperThreading where you appear to have two logical cores but only one can execute instructions. Both Bulldozer cores can execute instructions simultaneously. Is it an optimal arrangement of those 8 cores? Nope. But that doesn't mean it isn't 8 cores.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:02PM (3 children)
I don't think anyone would have sued and gotten this far if the Bulldozer architecture wasn't such shit and hyped by AMD.
The new 24- and 32-core Threadripper 2 CPUs have potential bandwidth/latency issues for half of the cores, but I don't see any lawsuits.
Nvidia settled [arstechnica.com] a class action lawsuit over GTX 970's VRAM issue.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:25PM (2 children)
When buying a processor most folks look to see what the actual benchmarks are before purchase. I agree this architecture has all kinds of flaws that hobble its performance, but it doesn't change the fact that there are 8 instruction executing cores.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 26 2019, @12:13AM (1 child)
Actually, that fact isn't even really true. Because of the shared FPU's, if they are floating point instructions you've only got 4 executing cores.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Saturday January 26 2019, @09:34PM
Well yes and no. Floating point calculations are only a subset of the total CISC catalog, so depending on how you parse the instruction queue you can have one core running fpu calculations while the other does logic, branching, integer, or memory operations. The whole design is sub optimal to say the least but I would still say it's technically true to call it an 8 core processor, albeit one that sucks for things like coin mining.
Bottom line is "buyer beware". They should have evaluated the performance characteristics before buying it.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:13PM
Your comments are possibly the best I've read on it. Complete with a good example. Here's hoping this thing winds up in AMD's favor as this lawsuit reeks of someone looking for a payday.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:41PM (10 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday January 23 2019, @11:04PM (3 children)
I don't disagree that the underlying architecture is a mess with bottlenecks all over the place including the FPU. However the design does include 8 discrete cpu's. The fpu situation doesn't take away from there being 8 cores which can all crunch instructions simultaneously. I'm old enough to remember when cpu's and fpu's were two seperate chips and you could operate the machine without an fpu.
I think as a matter of law you can't say this isn't an 8 core processor, it's just a really really bad one. The buyer should have reviewed the performance benchmarks before buying.
(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
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:05AM
There has been enough press over the years espousing the technological marvel that is the completely independent core that it is very understandable that buyers would assume that a core is synonymous with a complete CPU.
(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".
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:51AM (1 child)
This could get very foggy. It's normal for some instructions to take multiple cycles. These are super scalar CPUs, which means it's also normal for multiple instructions to execute in one cycle (on one core). With the pipelined design, it's also possible for multiple instructions to be "executing" during a cycle even if none of them happen to finish on that cycle.
I think it's reasonable to say that AMD's chip had eight cores, with pairs of cores having contention for shared FPU resources. Just like any multi-core chip has shared I/O and memory bandwidth. But chips with hyperthreading don't count the additional thread as a separate core, so another way to look at it would be to compare the functionality that is duplicated on one core with HT versus the two cores in AMD's module. (Since I don't know anything about HT I can't currently answer that)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 25 2019, @08:22AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @11:14AM
We'll soon find out. I'm personally glad to get a definition for "core", I've been wondering myself. Like noted above, marketing makes a huge mess of everything.