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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: 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.
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