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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 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.