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In 2011 AMD released the Bulldozer architecture, with a somewhat untraditional implementation of the "multicore" technology. Now, 4 years later, they are sued for false advertising, fraud and other "criminal activities". From TFA:
In claiming that its new Bulldozer CPU had "8-cores," which means it can perform eight calculations simultaneously, AMD allegedly tricked consumers into buying its Bulldozer processors by overstating the number of cores contained in the chips. Dickey alleges the Bulldozer chips functionally have only four cores—not eight, as advertised.
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AMD Sued by Customer Over Misrepresentation of "Multicore"
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Lay on, MacDuff, and curs'd be him who first cries, "Hold, enough!".
-- Shakespeare
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 07 2015, @03:37AM
I should have noted that monitoring programs actually appear to monitor all 12 of my cores. That is, I don't have six pairs of cores, with the activity of one core slaved to that of another. Each of my 12 cores shows increasing and decreasing usage independent of any other core. We can be reasonably sure that diagnostic program writers aren't in collusion with AMD to disguise the core usage on my computer.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:03AM
Monitoring programs?
You know how those really work? There is no set rule you know.
Microsoft [microsoft.com] says it just counts passes through their idle routine. Linux does it differently, watching for time when there no tasks waiting to be dispatched.
But none of those methods mean didly squat when processors can be throttled up or down by a simple voltage change.
Percentage of idle time means nothing when the processor is slowed to just a fraction of its clock speed, and a tiny little routine can use all the available cycles because the processor is running so slowly.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 07 2015, @02:02PM
run LINPACK. Very hard to hide maths capability if there is none...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Saturday November 07 2015, @03:14PM
An Atom N450 CPU has 1 core and 2 threads in a similar setup, branded "Hyper-Threading Technology" by Intel. The monitoring programs shipped with Xubuntu (top, Xfce4 Task Manager, and Xfce4 CPU Graph Plugin) see it as two cores.