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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."
It's the OS that identifies it as two cores. Remember, the rule is - can you blame Microsoft? - No problem!
It is nothing but a bunch of resistors to generate heat. There are more brains in an electronic parking meter.
My i5 is ID'd as a 4-core device. Windows shows it that way. But it's two cores. Hyperthreading or something.
What's up with that?
Intel has a lot to learn from its smaller rival's marketing department :)
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.
Get your Friday news on Sunday!
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/217672-analysis-amd-lawsuit-over-false-bulldozer-chip-marketing-is-without-merit
And as everybody knows, twice the cores equals twice the performance.
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.
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.
A judge is likely to ask : Were there 8 cores ? If the answer is yes, which it seems to be , then AMD is in the clear.
No multi-core CPU box ever came with a statement that all 8 cores would be capable of processing instructions in parallel at the same time. It does however mean, that AMDs 8-core is significantly worse than Intel's 8-core.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
it's not false advertising. the cores feature separate integer units. that's good enough to call each module two separate cores. the FPU is actually an add-on processor to the integer unit.
what matters here is not what is the specs but the performance of the unit. so because the performance of the hardware was not misrepresented, and because the characteristics of the CPU were represented finely, this lawsuit is basically a farce attempt to attack or extract money from AMD.
everyone was well aware of the CPUs performance from the day it was released because of mass publications that analyzed the CPU performance and published the performance results, showing it beat the equivalent Intel design in some cases but mostly offering lackluster performance in comparison. this has always been known about recently AMD CPUs, that they do not perform the same as Intel CPUs and feature drastically different designs.
I fail to see the claim to damages here .. at all. It seems more like a thinking error on the part of the filer, believing that "two cores" had to mean the same thing as they personally wanted to believe it meant .. In all advertisements for AMD's designs, it's plainly laid out the design of the Bulldozer architecture, and that the units feature two integer units and one shared FPU resource. I'm not aware of any advertisement that ever said differently.
http://www.obamasweapon.com/ http://www.drrobertduncan.com/
Soooo Can I sue Intel / Amd / Cyrix for providing 386 chips with no integrated math co-processor, housing that functionality in the 387?
I mean, if you bought a 3.5GHz chip and it didn't perform as fast as an Intel 3.5GHz it must be misleading marketing, right? We all know that clock speed is all that matters when you compare a chip. And, I've been told, that they may be reducing clock speed dynamically when the processor isn't fully loaded - basically cheating you out of the speed you PAID for. I hear AMD also ran over your cat.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Regardless of how many cores you have, 90% of the crap that 90% of people do doesn't even benefit from having more than two cpu cores, and it only benefits from that because you can use one core for "the app you're running in the foreground" and one core for literally all other background tasks so your system doesn't lock up if you really need to use 100% of a core, AMD can throw more cores at their CPUs but end users won't see real world performance benefits except in limited scenarios. Intel's super cheap Pentium G3220 at 3ghz (and with only two cores) beats everything AMD sells except for hand-picked benchmarks where AMD's core advantage overcomes its brutal per-clock disadvantage. Single threaded performance is whats king and you'd have to run an AMD cpu at like 5ghz to overcome its poor performance per clock to beat a 3ghz Intel (core-architecture) CPU. And its sad for me to say this because I bought nothing but AMD CPUs from like 2000 until 2014. I wish they could be competetive but the situation looks pretty bleak. I can't use their stuff when their 8 core 4.5ghz cpu is only "a little bit faster" than my 4 core 3ghz phenom from 2009, but my i7 4790k is like, a solid 3 times faster than that 2009 phenom in almost anything you throw at it.
Is this the same AMD "8-core" device that's in both PS-4 and Xbox One consoles?
If so, the consequences may go much wider than this story makes it appear!
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
I own one of the Trinity series processors with the same design, (four cores, with two shared FPUs) and my understanding is that you can run four threads on it, but only two can use floating point manipulation at a time. Since processes like game physics threads can't always be subdivided, only running one or two processes using FPUs is not such a big deal.You can still run other non-FP operations at full steam, like compiling software on make -j4. If you need to run massive parallel FP manipulation (open simulator grid, protein folding, etc.), then you probably should be running server processors anyway... or better yet, use the GPU.
I facepalmed at the mention of how Intel allegedly doesn't do this... does anybody remember HyperThreading? :-P
AMD has been doing this for a long time. They always hide the truth and try real hard to count HT cores as real ones in their marketing.
Honestly they need to stop being allowed to advertise "cores" if they are not honest to goodness real separate processor cores.
I hope AMD loses HARD on this and forces the industry to stop being misleading assholes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You are all...never mind.
Better late than never! And I'm speaking as an ex-AMD fanboy who did the Duron conductive paint trick, but got burned with 760MP. After that, never bought another AMD product again.
I hope they get burned!
Good point. It's one thing to base it on MHz, which usually was a good indicator of relative speed within a CPU architecture (even though a 150MHz Alpha was slower than a 150MHz Pentium). It's another thing to base it on #cores, since it's well known that parallelism in CPUs is hard to extract, in which case, beyond 4 CPUs, one is quickly hitting the point of diminishing returns.
Also, to what extent have the loads on Floating point units changed? I recall that in the 90s, FPUs used to be heavily de-emphasized, due to the fact that then versions of Windows were very light on it. In fact, NexGen - one of the companies that AMD acquired - excluded them altogether, while if you needed high floating point performances, you went w/ RISC - Alpha, PA-RISC or Power. Today, people use GPUs for any floating point intensive firepower that may be needed, so that begs the question - how critical is it to have a high performance floating point unit for every core in the CPU?
Cant be, as the PS4 and Xbox One use Puma derived cores, a completely different Architecture than the Buldozer derived Desktop CPU.
The Puma Cores do NOT share the FPU. Puma CPU use a special low power Design that doesn`t scale up well above about 2 GHz
They've got nothing on NVIDIA, who advertise the GTX 980 as having 2048 "cores", when by any standard definition it only has 16 (or if you're really generous, you could maybe argue it has 64, but that's pushing it). They count every lane of their vector unit as a separate core. By that standard, AMD (and Intel) should multiply all their core counts by 8, since each AVX unit can do 8 int or float operations at once.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I don't see how this issue can affect PS-4 and Xbox One consoles. Both those are marketed with out disclosure to the public on how many cores their processors have. Most people that buy games consoles don't care about that as long as their a radical performance increase over their last console.
I doubt that ether microsoft or sony will have anything to say ether. Both their engineering teams crawled all over the cpu designs they where planning to put in the console. They didn't just point at a cpu and said that one is good. They knew exactly what they where putting into those consoles.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If slow processors get the work done fast enough, and they allow the device to be smaller, generate less heat, and run longer on a given mass of battery, then I'll take the slow processors.
"The suit claims that Bulldozer's design means its cores cannot work independently, and as a result, cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently."
If the suit really makes this claim it is easy for AMD to defend, because an AMD Bulldozer with 4 modules / 8 cores can actually execute 8 independent floating point instructions per cycle.
The two cores in each module share the floating point units, but each module contains 2 independent 128-bit FMAC units. Floating point throughput could be even higher, if both cores would have their own 2 128-bit FMACs, but would likely be lower if AMD decided to go with a single 128-bit FMAC per core. Sharing the floating point units allows higher execution speeds within the same area, as in most cases only one core is currently executing FPU instructions and that core can reach a higher speed with 2 execution units vs. one.
Jan
I wish to file a class-action lawsuit to the entire drone industry. I have purchased several drones. None of these drones have the capability of an actual drone. My understanding is that a drone can fly itself. This is false marketing and misleading to customers!
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.
When I went apartment-hunting five years ago, one of the buildings was advertising its unit features to include polarized plugs. And auto-defrost refrigerators.
You know, in case you had been living in 1950.
is garbage. End of story.
I run at least 5 VMs on it. And they all run all the time (in addition to the host OS). It also took some initial effort to unpark every other core. Which means cores 2,4,6,8 can be parked independently of their cousins. AMD chips are better for running VMs, while Intel chips are better at running games. I couldn't run 5 VM's on Intel 5 (4 cores with hyperthreading). The actual CPU count is 8 on the AMD chip. You don't need an FPU to run basic operating system threads themselves. It also has more symmetric caching. Whereas Intel's caching is clearly geared at increasing the speed up of each running core.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Isn't four years too long to bring suit for this?
and Juries are really, really unpredictable. Even if the outcome is legally obvious it doesn't mean the jury won't get dazzled into blaming AMD.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you're a consumer, you can't base your buying decision based on a single specification. You have to look at your needs vs what is important to you. For some people performance/$ is important. For others, performance $/watt is more important. You have to compare based on the applications that are important to you. If you, as a typical desktop/laptop user, mostly use application A and price is the main consideration, it doesn't matter if the CPU runs at 3 or 4 GHz, 4 threads or 8 threads, etc. What matters is performance/$. If you have $200 to spend on a cpu, it really doesn't matter who makes the better $700 cpu.
There are plenty of resources available to help people make decisions. Only relying on marketing department information is just plain dumb.
The issue is not whether the slashdot crowd (or similarly geared crowd) understands the technical specifics but whether or not the average consumer who only understands "more is better, bigger is better".
Who cares if the average slashdot geek understands the difference between a "core" and a "module". The underlying affect is misinformation and seemingly false advertising.
I am sure much like VW this will turn out to be the work of a single rogue engineer.
Eight instruction can, in fact, be executed simultaneously. Run a parallel CompletableFuture task or something, and this becomes extremely obvious. Each parallel "run" use a ClassTransformer to see the ASM instructions being run with a locking (NOT a re-entrant lock) counter, and a \n every 8 locks/unlocks.
You will see 8 ASM instructions at a time.
That being said...physically they aren't cores, and shouldn't be referred to as such. They should have referred to them with their own term "module." If they didn't...they should be sued.
The fact that, years later, _WE_ are still arguing about this proves that the case has merit.
If WE can't come to a consensus about this... then how is Joe Scmoe supposed to figure it out?
The fact is: this was _misleading_ advertising. They could have easily come up with another name for it (like Intel did with Hyperthreads)... instead they consciously chose to call the extra ALUs _cores_... which does have a meaning to the typical consumer. They did this, on purpose, to muddy the waters... and they REALLY did.
Does that mean that people shouldn't be more careful about what they buy? Sure. But that doesn't absolve AMD from putting out misleading advertising.
In a completely synthetic benchmark, I recall the 8300 being double the speed of the 4300 and the 6300 coming in right in the middle. So I guess their theoretical limitation and pretend core complaint is just that, theoretical. Oh and also it's bullshit.
No. Consoles are based on jaguar.
I've always preferred to use the following to describe the Intel architectures: (# arbitrary parallel processes) + (possible # additional parallel processes).
For most i7's that's a 4+4 core CPU. The i5 is either a 2+2 or 4+0, and so on. I'd think these new AMD offerings would be in the 4+4 range, although this description doesn't indicate how often a workload can satisfy the requirement. I'm sure we could complicate it by adding a percentage at the end or something, i.e. 4+4x.75 (75% of the common workloads have the equivalent of 8 cores). You'd think the industry could adopt this (or a similar) approach.
I'm still waiting for a PC that can blast process like my old Genesis.
no, those use AMD's low power Bobcat cores. Bulldozer is supposed to be faster per clock, but use more electricity.
Sony and Microsoft decided to pick small, low-power cores, clock them at 1.7GHz to reduce the power use, and pack as many GPU cores as they could fit.
So glad someone is finally suing AMD for this BS! A 4 core CPU does not equal an 8 core CPU simply because AMD feels like calling it one! 2 ALU + 1 FPU equals a single core CPU, not a dual core. There are lots of CPU's out there that have multiple ALU's, but are single core. If AMD had included a additional FPU unit per core and not shared them because each other, then yes, otherwise NO! AMD just keeps on shooting itself in the foot.
I have an AMD FX-8350. Technically, it's a piledriver, which is one iteration newer than a bulldozer, but it's the same chip.
The only thing these CPUs do better than Intel CPUs is run truly parallel tasks, because you're getting literally 8 cores, no hyperthreading.
As I recall, there are two cores per "module" and they share a few things (I looked it up in 2012 but I've long since forgotten the details) but claiming they are not actual real cores is complete fucking idiocy.
i7s run circles around these things, but given that the cost difference, I'd expect them to.