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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: 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?
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(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.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(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.