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
If the authors were to revise their paper today, they'd be more careful about broadness they use the word "core" to describe things. On page two, they actually contradict themselves:First instance of core describes a multiprocessor "core" where the second instance describes execution "core." CMT shares multiprocessor "core" resources but not execution "cores." Paper is confusing AF because they use multiple definitions of "core" interchangeably.
A processor contains cores -> multiple cores -> multi-processor cores. An execution cores as you want to call it, is still a core alright.
A modern uniprocessor driver can drive both threads of Bulldozer with no degradation in performance...just like Pentium 4 w/ HT or Zen with one core enabled.
regmedia.co.uk/2019/01/22/amd-core-class-action.pdfAMD made no attempt in marketing to explain to the public that "8-core" in their branding is "8-execution core." Lie by omission; false advertising.
A "core that is able to operate independent from other cores". Sorry, that's not it, an execution core can also operate independently from other execution cores.
Bulldozer was the exception, not the rule. The rule is what the public understands it to be.Except that AMD itself disagreed with that assessment when it launched Athlon 64 X2: the "cores" were multiprocessor and independent.
AMD can't redefine the word to its advantage: it must be truthful in advertising.
Core replication is obvious it checks out, boys lets pack up and go home. Sixteen independent cores in this processor.
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This design enables resource sharing among cores within a cluster, thus reducing the area requirements. All cores in a cluster share an instruction fetch unit (IFU) that includes the level-one (L1) instruction cache. We decided that all four cores in a cluster should share the IFU because it is relatively simple to fetch a large number of instructions per cycle. Thus, four cores can share one IFU in a round-robin fashion while maintaining full fetch bandwidth. Furthermore, the shared instruction cache enables constructive sharing of common code, as is encountered in shared libraries and operating system routines.
Each core cluster contains two L1 data caches (D cache) and two floating-point units (FGU), each of which is shared by a pair of cores, these structures are relatively large, so sharing them provides significant area savings.
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Shailender Chaudhry, Robert Cypher, Magnus Ekman, Martin Karlsson, Anders Landin, Sherman Yip, Hakan Zeffer, Marc Tremblay - Sun Microsystems
ROCK, SUN’S THIRD-GENERATION CHIP-MULTITHREADING PROCESSOR, CONTAINS 16 HIGH-PERFORMANCE CORES
Your distinction has nothing to do with what is written in this filling because that was never meant to be part their argument, they simply never went that far.
Their only point was about cores being "independent", if you read carefully they never actually directly bring into question what is supposed to be a core, just that they believe it has to be an "independent processing unit". Good luck with equating that to anything, there is an endless list of ICs that fit that description.
And on that note, I'll repeat myself, execution cores are independent.
Multi-processor cores don't share anything except memory.
Gotcha again.
This is about cores, not processors.
Dual-core communicating through the SRI => glue-interconnect
Dual-core communicating through cache unit => no glue
Execution cores are sharing FGUs and instruction decoders. Multiprocessor cores share nothing; ergo, my statement is correct: it's a quad-core processor. "Core replication is obvious." A quad-core is obvious in that diagram, each having a dedicated L2.Define "core." I'm spelling it out because people like to call two different things a "core" when they're very different things (honestly, everyone in this thread should know better by now). To be very blunt: "core" to the public is synonymous with "multiprocessor core." If you're referring to the other kind of core (the very technical component of a processor which executes instructions), it must be clarified as, for example, an "integer cluster" or an "execution core." "Core" since 2005, has never referred to "execution core" unless pretext gives it that context. AMD didn't on their marketing materials.
"may be equivalent"
May not, execution cores classify as cores too according to this definition and dependencies are not even brought into question.And one of them is wrong in assuming that core must meant what you're saying it means. Or what this lawsuit says it means.
inspirit.net.in/books/academic/Computer%20Organisation%20and%20Architecture%208e%20by%20William%20Stallings.pdf
On page 18:They literally added a chapter describing multicore processors. Chapter 18 starts on PDF 707 which contradicts the 10th edition:In other words, the author, William Stallings, redefined "core" himself to accommodate AMD's lie. I don't know what year the 10th edition was published but I guarantee you it is after Bulldozer debuted in 2011. This is an inconsistent/poor source.
Why are you assuming he was accommodating AMD's lie and not that he was accommodating an archaic definition for a more modern and relevant one instead ?It sure as hell is better than none, I didn't write any book on the subject and neither did you, few tried to classify these things, unsurprisingly.
But let's go to the extremes, check out flynn's taxonomy which dates back into the 60s. He classifies units such as SISD, SIMD as being a type of "computer" and "processing units", not quite cores because that wasn't even a thing back then but it sure gives you something to think about.
You're trying very hard to split the term core into something that bears multiple meanings and claim that only one is correct.
It's not my fault the lawsuit was formulated in the worst possible way from this perspective. If they made it clear that they believed AMD was trying to market one kind of core as something else or that one certain type of core was counted in a incorrect manner, yes I would have agreed to you but they didn't. They just said AMD lied about having "independent processing unit", as I said, a million things match that description.
AMD's Bulldozer architecture has, at the very least 8 independent cores/processing units.
I really don't see the purpose of continuing this. Your own sources turned against you.
There's literally nothing left to debate: it's settled. "Core" in the context of computer technology, henceforth means "multiprocessor core." By that very basic test, FX-8350 is a quad-core.
That's why GPU manufacturers say their GPUs have thousands of cores because well, those are one type of core even though they are very different from CPU cores.
That's why even manufacturers that make AI chips say they have x amount of cores. Those are cores too even though they look nothing like CPU cores.