AMD is set to face legal action over claims that it falsely advertised one of its previous generation CPU architectures. The Bulldozer CPU had a mixed response when released, due in part to its unique design which hampered the chip’s competition against Intel’s equivalent processor. Now, according to Legal Wire, AMD is set for a belated kicking over the Bulldozer architecture after a class-action lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The lawsuit alleges that AMD falsely advertised its Bulldozer CPUs as having eight cores, despite the chip being unable to handle eight instructions simultaneously, and thus is guilty of false advertising, fraud, breach of express warrant, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act of California’s Unfair Competition Law.
The trouble stems from the Bulldozer’s “Clustered Integer Core” micro-architecture, which combines two integer cores with a one floating-point core and a shared L2 cache, with multiple modules combined to form the CPU. But, according to Tony Dickey who filed the suit, the two integer cores cannot operate independently, which leaves the chips only able to operate four simultaneous commands, not eight.
Dickey claims that “tens of thousands of consumers” that do not understand the complexity of CPUs have been fooled into buying chips that cannot operate in the same manner as a “true eight-core” processor would, causing “material performance degradation”.
Image courtesy of Softpedia.
For your information, actually there is no such thing as “integer” core in microprocessor technology. The CPU core has always been integer-based in its operations (logical, arithmetic, bit manipluation, etc) including address generation. That is true since the very first microprocessor. That FPU originally was an external co-processor chip which was an optional plugin upgrade in the early days of the IBM PC, thus not considered as part of the main microprocessor core.