Friday, November 6th 2015
AMD Dragged to Court over Core Count on "Bulldozer"
This had to happen eventually. AMD has been dragged to court over misrepresentation of its CPU core count in its "Bulldozer" architecture. Tony Dickey, representing himself in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accused AMD of falsely advertising the core count in its latest CPUs, and contended that because of they way they're physically structured, AMD's 8-core "Bulldozer" chips really only have four cores.
The lawsuit alleges that Bulldozer processors were designed by stripping away components from two cores and combining what was left to make a single "module." In doing so, however, the cores no longer work independently. Due to this, AMD Bulldozer cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently as claimed, or the way a true 8-core CPU would. Dickey is suing for damages, including statutory and punitive damages, litigation expenses, pre- and post-judgment interest, as well as other injunctive and declaratory relief as is deemed reasonable.
Source:
LegalNewsOnline
The lawsuit alleges that Bulldozer processors were designed by stripping away components from two cores and combining what was left to make a single "module." In doing so, however, the cores no longer work independently. Due to this, AMD Bulldozer cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently as claimed, or the way a true 8-core CPU would. Dickey is suing for damages, including statutory and punitive damages, litigation expenses, pre- and post-judgment interest, as well as other injunctive and declaratory relief as is deemed reasonable.
511 Comments on AMD Dragged to Court over Core Count on "Bulldozer"
Dickey et. al. needs to expand on this: I'd argue that the word "core" explicitly means independence to the public. To say otherwise, is to let AMD define the word in a way that is inconsistent with competitor offerings and even their own previous offerings.
It's pretty easy to tell what is shared and what isn't by comparing number of pools of L2 and up with number of cores in the system. It should be 1:1. Bulldozer split the L1 data cache from what should be 32-64 KB to two 16 KB caches.
it was funny until I remembered the same company now owns AnandTech ... now it's just sad
-L1 instruction
-Instruction Fetch
-Branch Predicition
-Predecode/Pick
-Instruction decoder
-Dispatch
-FPU
-Write Coalescing Cache
-Core Interface Unit
If you plucked the integer cluster out of the module and tried to use it by itself, you'd find it capable of little more than running a calculator. It needs that shared instruction decoder or it is completely worthless in an x86 system.
www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/t1-08-ust1-uasuppl-draft-p-ext-1537736.html
Floating-point work went to the "external interface" to reach the FPU.
In other words, what constitutes a core depends on the hardware, its architecture, and any claims made by the company. No surprise there to be honest.
1, 3, 4) legalese
2) plaintiff should have gotten IBM, Intel, ARM, and Sun to testify instead of relying on Tom's Hardware
Which leads to this: Which is why the case is still open:
www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/9674725/Dickey_v_Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc
Dickey did a terrible job at making his case: Dickey clearly didn't do his homework before filing suit.
Edit: I'm not certain he can win his case because of that testimony. He had to go into the purchase "believing the would not share resources." The logical conclusion is that he realized the performance was poor, did some searching on the internet, found the Tom's Hardware article, and sued without really thinking about it nor consulting experts on how to make the strongest case against AMD. It doesn't prove AMD right, it proves Dickey didn't make his case.
Because all processors require decoders, prefetcher, ALUs, AGUs, and in most cases, FPUs, to qualify as a general processor. If we start defining processors by integer clusters, there's going to be a race to cram as many integer clusters as they can into a processor--all of the blocking components be damned. This is not a good path to travel down for consumers. This is why Xeon Phi never made it to consumers. Dumbed down cores aren't very useful to the public.
Don't forget that the lawsuit isn't if AMD has 8 fully independent cores or not (which the court as seemed to have accepted that they are independent enough to call them cores using Dickey's own resources,) but, rather if AMD misled the public with regards to how the CPU operates. Simply put, core or not, AMD stated from the get-go that it would have shared components well before it was even released. That alone is enough to throw away half of the case.
suspectknow Bulldozer will not show 80-100% in 5-8 like it does in 1-4. It represents proof they aren't cores but SMT inside a core. There's nothing wrong about that. What is wrong is calling it a "core" when it isn't. Negative, the latest court documents says they are pursuing alternative dispute resolution which means they are trying to reach an agreement (settle) before it ends up back in court. There's only press coverage of these things when they start and when they end--not in between.This is where AMD failed. If Bulldozer was marketed as a 4c/8t chip it may not have been such a bust; because without a doubt its performance running 5-8 threads is much better compared to a hyperthreaded 4c/8t intel chip under most workloads. Yet calling it an 8 core chip set the bar higher and threads 5-8 couldnt reach that mark.
I wonder what the settlement will be, $25 off of next year's Zen chips? In the end, only the lawyers will come out with any real money in this suit.
Abstract: Figure 2 in the paper looks almost exactly like a BD module.
So, @FordGT90Concept, this type of core has a scientific name, it's a conjoined core ... keyword here is core.
AMD gave us branch misprediction penalty of a Northwood, L1D cache of a Prescott and conjoined cores from an IEEE paper ... last one being the least offensive ... too bad they can't be punished for the first two instead
Not sharing the L1D cache is bewildering. Even in that IEEE paper, they show a 64KiB shared L1D cache. If they were going to keep it separate, they should have had at least 32 KiB in each.
Edit: The paper says there is a performance cost: I think that's something the public has the right to know because that is significant.