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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 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. :)