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When is a CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide.

posted by takyon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the class-excavation dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:12PM (6 children)

    by Mykl (1112) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:12PM (#790850)

    What other technical terms with well established meanings became meaningless due to marketing and advertisements?

    Cloud enabled
    Scalable
    Modern displays with refresh rates in Hertz
    "Hacker"

    Any more?

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by BsAtHome on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:23PM

    by BsAtHome (889) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:23PM (#790857)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:12AM (#790959)

    Please update your response to include "synergy" and "game changer".

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:56AM (2 children)

      by Reziac (2489) on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:56AM (#791007) Homepage

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:22AM (#791118)

        Seriously. No blockchain?

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:46PM

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:46PM (#791288) Journal

          It's called Crypto now.

          They talk about "crypto" and don't realize that word already has an established meaning predating digital currency.

          --
          Q. How much did Santa's sled cost?
          A. Nothing. It was on the house.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @11:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @11:44PM (#792100)

    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.