Wednesday, August 28th 2019
AMD to Cough Up $12.1 Million to Settle "Bulldozer" Core Count Class-Action Lawsuit
AMD reached a settlement in the Class Action Lawsuit filed against it, over alleged false-marketing of the core-counts of its eight-core FX-series processors based on the "Bulldozer" microarchitecture. Each member of the Class receives a one-time payout of USD $35 per chip, while the company takes a hit of $12.1 million. The lawsuit dates back to 2015, when Tony Dickey, representing himself in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accused AMD of false-marketing of its FX-series "Bulldozer" processor of having 8 CPU cores. Over the following four years, the case gained traction as a Class Action was built against AMD this January.
In the months that followed the January set-up of a 12-member Jury to examine the case, lawyers representing the Class and AMD argued over the underlying technology that makes "Bulldozer" a multi-core processor, and eventually discussed what a fair settlement would be for the Class. They eventually agreed on a number - $12.1 million, or roughly $35 per chip AMD sold, which they agreed was "fair," and yet significantly less than the "$60 million in premiums" consumers contended they paid for these processors. Sifting through these numbers, it's important to understand what the Class consists of. It consists of U.S. consumers who became interested to be part of the Class Action, and who bought an 8-core processor based on the "Bulldozer" microarchitecture. It excludes consumers of every other "Bulldozer" derivative (4-core, 6-core parts, APUs; and follow-ups to "Bulldozer" such as "Piledriver," "Excavator," etc.).
Image Credit: Taylor Alger
Source:
The Register
In the months that followed the January set-up of a 12-member Jury to examine the case, lawyers representing the Class and AMD argued over the underlying technology that makes "Bulldozer" a multi-core processor, and eventually discussed what a fair settlement would be for the Class. They eventually agreed on a number - $12.1 million, or roughly $35 per chip AMD sold, which they agreed was "fair," and yet significantly less than the "$60 million in premiums" consumers contended they paid for these processors. Sifting through these numbers, it's important to understand what the Class consists of. It consists of U.S. consumers who became interested to be part of the Class Action, and who bought an 8-core processor based on the "Bulldozer" microarchitecture. It excludes consumers of every other "Bulldozer" derivative (4-core, 6-core parts, APUs; and follow-ups to "Bulldozer" such as "Piledriver," "Excavator," etc.).
291 Comments on AMD to Cough Up $12.1 Million to Settle "Bulldozer" Core Count Class-Action Lawsuit
1) Meritless suit.
2) Only covers California purchases.
3) Doesn't even cover all of the 8 core consumer-grade FX chips.
o_O
Intel's CPUs with hyperthreading enabled, on the market after hyperthreading's insecurity (which requires disabling hyperthreading to fix) was made public don't actually have the claimed thread count — because hyperthreading has to be disabled because it's a fundamentally insecure implementation.
CPUs, including Intel CPUs, that don't have AVX-512 enabled or included aren't real CPUs. They simply don't have real cores. Real cores have to have AVX-512.
CPUs that don't have AVX-512 enabled or included aren't real CPUs if they came out after Intel's first consumer-grade CPU with AVX-512 hit the market. These imitation CPUs don't have real cores. Real cores have AVX-512.
CPUs that don't have the ability to process AVX-256 in a single cycle aren't real CPUs.
These are the kind of claims that fit right in with this lawsuit and how you see the FX 8150. They are arbitrary decisions made by the viewer, not backed by reality. (The only one of those claims with any teeth is the claim that Intel shouldn't be selling hyperthreading CPUs with an insecure implementation under the claimed thread count, unless it can be proven that Intel withheld knowledge of its hyperthreading insecurity for a number of years, in which case earlier CPUs would also be relevant. I am including this claim in my sample, though, to illustrate a few points that I think people can figure out on their own, given the context.)
The FPU count of a core is an arbitrary matter. Many CPUs have been sold that didn't even have FPUs. No CPUs have ever been sold that only have FPU cores, which is why counting the number of integer cores is non-arbitrary.
Guess you can view these modules as double wide INT pipelines and call these 4C/8T instead of 8C/8T, but that would not be completely true now would it?
Did AMD lie about the architecture? Not really. Block diagrams show whats what. G
Did AMD lie about core counts? Bit of grey area depending on how one views the architecture as a whole.
Was Bulldozer uarch good? Hell no.
Does this entitle anyone to get money back cause they had chosen poorly even after the reviews? Not really at least in my opinion.
But seemingly you can sue back money if you band together with other people who had bought into FX even after reading trough the benchmarks, not once but even after years of Excator and Piledriver reviews.
'Murica at work right there.
The system benefits the wealthy who don't care about the environment. In a nutshell.
Anyway. Yawn. I don’t agree with this. Also wasn’t there a time when Windows displayed the 8xxx cpu’s as quad cores with SMT?
these things are going to happen in this industry, they happen to all of them, I honestly don't think it has anything to do with deceit really. /shrug most people go to work 9 to 5, they don't live and breathe this stuff like a lot of us here do... also /reddit showerthoughts - maybe these companies should hire us as consultants LOL
AMD could never win this argument without changing over a decade of precedents including by competitors like Sun, ARM, IBM, Intel, and even themselves (Athlon 64 X2). "Integer core" got lost in marketing translation to become something it isn't, a "core." If AMD accurately advertised the product as having "8 integer cores" this lawsuit would have never been filed.
=> Each core is dedicated to a thread and contains a four-wide integer execution unit, issue/retire logic, 16-KB four-way set associative L1data cache, and a load/store unit.
Of which there are two.None of this proves what you have stated.1. 4 macro-ops goes to 4 ALUs+4 AGUs
2. The split decoder is 2 macro-ops for 2 ALUs+2 AGUs.
3. The FPU has 2x 128-bit FMACs + 2x 128-bit MMXs; 2x the FMA capability and 2x the FMISC capability compared to Thuban.
Windows had never seen a CPU with Bulldozer's configuration before. There is also the matter of arbitrary/political choices made by coders and their managers.Citation please.
A core only needs an instruction bus, a control unit, a datapath, and a data bus.
img.techpowerup.org/190828/core-replication-is-obvious.png
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/bulldozer-core-count-debate-comes-back-to-haunt-amd.251758/
I'm not going to reargue all this when it's been settled. :roll:
Here's the specific quote though, just for you (page 11):
accel.cs.vt.edu/files/lecture2.pdf
The value of Bulldozer isn't relevant here.
How "shady" various corporations is isn't relevant here, with the possible exception of pointing out that corporations are shady by definition because profit is extracted by selling things for more than their worth. In order to do that, people must be tricked into parting with more of their money than they should.
What is relevant is the technical definition of a core. As I already posted, FPUs are not even required to have a CPU core. Please, at least, try to rebut what I've said instead of ignoring my arguments entirely. I've done more than just point out that FPUs aren't required.
Both are important. First one because if you are the maket leader newer software will probably be optimized for your newer architecture and maybe some of the older software will see optimizations. Second is also important because if older software runs like crap on your new cpu architecture you might not really sell that many cpus.
By development I understand more than cpu design phase, I also understand the samples testing phase. During samples testing it's impossible not to see them underperforming with the existing software and in this situation you need to go back to design phase and fix what is wrong.
As the underdog if you expect the software to get optimized for your architecture then you are kinda suicidal. The software developers are not really gonna bother, they gonna point that their software works better on your older architecture and on your competition cpus and are not gonna waste their time with your architecture and as result your cpus are gonna perform badly and you are not gonna sell...