Dickey clearly didn't do his homework before filing suit.
That first one that's highlighted was him admitting that he knew that there were shared resources before he bought it which makes fraud a hard nut to crack because AMD most definitely disclosed that bulldozer was going to have shared resources. It doesn't really matter if you consider it a core or not, he knew what he was buying regardless of what your definition of a core is. He didn't just not do his homework, he doesn't seem to understand that fraud requires being deceived and being deceived doesn't mean being ignorant about what you're reading.
Because all processors require decoders, prefetcher, ALUs, AGUs, and in most cases, FPUs, to qualify as a general processor.
Sure, but, invoking the unwritten rule that all of those things must be dedicated hardware to constitute a core is still the primary problem.
This is why Xeon Phi never made it to consumers. Dumbed down cores aren't very useful to the public.
The Xeon Phi never made it to the consumer because it's like GPGPU. Consumers don't really care about machine learning or HPC applications. To think consumers would have benefited from having a Xeon Phi in their system (a co-processor mind you,) is a pretty big stretch.
regarding definition of what core is, why would we suddenly start making fixed definitions in rapidly changing tech fields?
We wouldn't? I think this is really all just to help Ford sleep at night. Simply put, Ford was pretty insistent that not only Dickey was going to win but, that it would be a crushing defeat for AMD when it wasn't since even the first page of this now 19 page thread. I suspect that isn't the only thing Ford is wrong about regardless of whether we wants to admit that to himself or not and I think the hardliner attitude only makes it that much more apparent. Honestly, people who actually work in the field and are good at it understand that you can't think this way. As a developer, it doesn't really matter about the specifics about the core. If I can expect core-like performance characteristics as opposed to SMT-like characteristics, then I consider it a core. If BD was like hyper-threading in the sense that speed up is 0-40%, I would agree with Ford but, it's not. There is almost always speed up and it's more often than not, more than 50% which is better speed up versus what Intel's SMT implementation is capable of on a good day.
Dismissing isn't winning unless the plaintiff gives up (Dickey has not) or the judge closes the door to trying again (which was not). The fact AMD and Dickey are trying to settle now suggests that AMD thinks there is a case to be made and they want to stop it. AMD wants this behind them for Zen's launch.
It was dismissed because the court agreed with AMD that Dickey's argument wasn't strong enough (to put it lightly.) Heck, they even used his own resources against him. That does not mean that they're trying to settle, it means that it's at a standstill until Dickey makes a better case. AMD isn't going to settle if Dickey can't made a half decent argument where the court is willing to dismiss on AMD's request. Until Dickey actually tries to force the issue (and I would love him to try,) it might not be a win for AMD, but it's most definitely not a loss considering there has been practically no press on this as of late. Probably for very good reason (it's a dead end.)
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.