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AMD Sued Over Allegedly Misleading Bulldozer Core Count
An anonymous reader writes: A class action suit accuses AMD of misleading buyers about the number of cores in its Bulldozer-based CPUs. The complaint claims that the chips effectively had only four cores, while AMD claims there are eight. According to Ars: "AMD's multi-core Bulldozer chips use a unique design that combines the functions of what would normally be two discrete cores into a single package, which the company calls a module. Each module is identified as two separate cores in Windows, but the cores share a single floating point unit and instruction and execution resources. This is different from Intel's cores, which feature independent FPUs. The suit claims that Bulldozer's design means its cores cannot work independently, and as a result, cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently. This, the claim continues, results in performance degradation, and average consumers in the market for a CPU lack the technical expertise to understand the design of AMD's processors and trust the company to give accurate specifications regarding its CPUs."
Why is this even reported? This suit isn't going to go anywhere (unless AMD's lawyers are extremely incompetent, and the judge is extremely incapable of understanding basics about computer architecture and ISAs).
The AMD cores shared an FPU, sure, but sharing a resource doesn't mean that cores cannot execute simultaneously. The AMD cores still have independent integer-based execution units (instruction registers, register files, ALUs, branch counters, etc.), after all, and are fully capable of executing integer instructions simultaneously (which accounts for the vast majority of instructions under typical loading).
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
The sooner AMD goes down the toilet, the sooner someone competent takes over, the sooner Intel and Nvidia get competitive again.
At the moment, consumers and society as a whole are suffering from this beating of a dead horse. We need its death accelerated to the whole industry back on its toes again.
Why do you think AMD going bust would magically mean someone new stepping up to the plate? There are effing ginormous obstacles for a start-up to come and compete in the x86-scene, so much so that it's nearly impossible, and if Intel got a monopoly on the market even for a brief moment the situation would become even worse!
No, the better option is that AMD gets their shit together, never giving Intel full monopoly on the x86-market even for a bit.
I was shopping for VCRs about 20 years back and asked the Future Shop guy how much better it was for having (quoting from the card beside the VCR) a "19 micron tape head". Turns out they ALL had 19 micron tape-heads (whatever the hell that *meant*) as it was the spec for a VCR tape head, at the time, at least. It was just another bit of science-y sounding technobabble to put on the card.
Buying based on core count is like buying for the 19-micron thing; it's either a fast machine for your purposes or not. Absolutely the only way to tell that for sure is a test. The only thing that was ever useful with, say, "megahertz" was that it had for a decade or so there a correlation with the performance you'd get in real use. I've never found "cores" to have anything of the sort.
You're right! They're a joke! Hopefully they go bankrupt so you can buy an i5 for the price of a Xeon!
Was it so wrong of me?!
Yes
What answer did you want here. The only people this actually affects, know all about it already.
Think of it this way. Those trucks with the dualies on them? They have six tires right? Why? More traction and more wight capacity. Even if they only have two axles like the standard four tire variants. So what would be better, a dualie or a truck with three axles so you can still carry that weight? Well you get the dualie. You dont really need another axle you just need capacity and traction. The other axle duplicates parts that you don't need duplicated. Do you really want to maintain extra drive shafts, bearings, differentials?
It is the same thing with the AMD processor. You do not need extra FPU units, because most people will never benefit from them. So whats better, a hotter, more power hungry, more expensive chip, or one without the parts you don't need saving you money?
Anyways, they NEVER HID THIS. It is your job to do the research if you need something in particular. Depending on the advertising material for the computer manufacturer or what the dumb kid at best buy tells you makes this 100% completely your bad. If you did research on benchmarks they show you what speed it gets, so are you not getting what you looked up? If it accomplishes it as fast as the benchmarks show, then what are you bitching about? Do you really care how it does this? Fuck I don't care if the processor contains an evil demon that is being forced to accomplish all of this via black magic, it's not like I can fix it if it breaks either way. As long as it accomplishes what it claims to in the amount of time that is similar to the benchmarks, why exactly do you care?