[Ars] AMD sued over allegedly misleading Bulldozer core count

[AtenRa]

@ Magic Carpet

The topic is not about performance but about the characterization of the Quad Module FX as 8-core or not. Performance is irrelevant in this context.

 

[Magic Carpet]

FX8150 = 3938
Phenom II X6 1100 ME = 4083

You call that embarrassing ??

A lower-clocked older part beating their higher-clocked latest part would be an embarrassment for any company in CPU business. Sure, there were some workloads that ran considerably faster on FX but it didn't help the big picture much. People got confused and were misled with the whole FX branding name. FX brand was supposed to be kick-ass and screaming for highest performance. What they got essentially was a Prescott from a different company.

@ Magic Carpet

The topic is not about performance but about the characterization of the Quad Module FX as 8-core or not. Performance is irrelevant in this context.

With the past experiences... of 4/6 cores of Thuban/Deneb, the people were thinking of decent gains over what they had, so they assumed 8 cores werer going to be even better. Had AMD marketed the FX CPU differently, there wouldn't have been as many upset people today (the people who actually were thinking they were getting 8 performance cores, not some XYZ crazy modules). No sympathy for AMD from my part.

 

[AtenRa]

You are out of context here,

We are talking technically why the Bulldozer should be named an 8-core CPU or not. Not if people were upset about the performance.

 

[Magic Carpet]

We are talking technically why the Bulldozer should be named an 8-core CPU or not.

It doesn't perform like a genuine 8-core CPU would be my only argument. Carry on with discussion.

Not if people were upset about the performance.

But they were.... and hence the lawsuit, the idea of this thread

 

[SlowSpyder]

If you are speaking of 5960X than yes, it was slower in ST due to lower clockspeed, but it wasn't as embarrassing as this:

That is a single threaded benchmark. But I'm not sure what it has to do with the subject of the thread. The FX 8150 could be slower than Thuban in every bench there is, that doesn't mean anything in regards to core count.

 

[MrTeal]

It doesn't perform like a genuine 8-core CPU would be my only argument. Carry on with discussion.

You're right, an FX-8350 will perform almost all workloads much faster than a MediaTek MT6592.

 

[Puffnstuff]

The way I see it AMD touted 8 cores when in reality they only had four and had something akin to hyperthreading that they also counted as cores. My 4790 shows up as 8 cores in windows with hyperthreading but in reality it's only four cores and that is all that intel advertises with the cpu. I hope that AMD gets spanked over this one.

 

[gdansk]

The way I see it AMD touted 8 cores when in reality they only had four and had something akin to hyperthreading that they also counted as cores. My 4790 shows up as 8 cores in windows with hyperthreading but in reality it's only four cores and that is all that intel advertises with the cpu. I hope that AMD gets spanked over this one.

No. Following tradition: Bulldozer has 8 cores and 4 FPU. They are slow cores, sure, but that has no bearing on the number of cores. Intel's HT doesn't duplicate the execution units, Bulldozer's design duplicated all the CPU units beside L3 cache and FPU, neither of which have always been integral portions of CPUs.

 

[Vesku]

They may have been poorly planned to "outdo" the Pentium 4 instead of build upon AMD's own K series but there are two cores in each module. Not that the class action lawyers really care, they just want to reach a settlement where they get paid and the "victims" get a tiny check if anything at all. The memory price fixing class action, SDRAM and DDR1 era, was settled just a few years ago but only a fraction of those who applied for even the minimum compensation received anything, I was certainly stiffed.

 

[guskline]

To paraphrase Flounder in Animal House "Oh boy, this is going to be fun"!

 

[Burpo]

http://legalnewsline.com/stories/510646458-amd-faces-suit-over-alleged-misrepresentation-of-new-cpu

Edelson PC.. Tech's ambulance chaser..
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/technology/unpopular-in-silicon-valley.html?_r=0

Mr. Edelson may make his living suing tech companies, but he is breathless in his admiration for Silicon Valley culture and products. ..and he described the iPhone 6 Plus as “my favorite thing on earth.”

 

[FX2000]

ITT
People not knowing what SMT & CMT is.

 

[majord]

Silly lawsuit. But it was a huge PR blunder to sell them as 8 cores to begin with.

Today the result is i3 dual core with HT beats 6 FX cores. i3 dual core with HT beating 3 FX cores wouldn't have an equally bad wording today.

Pretty much this, With the exception that I'd argue an equally clocked fx 6xxx still beats a Skylake i3 in MT.

Oh, and it's beyond silly.

 

[JustMe21]

With the Internet and all the reviews out there, people not knowing what the performance of something is before buying it is their own fault. It's amazing how people buy the lowest priced computer and expect it to play every game or do anything amazingly fast. It also doesn't help that stores selling computers don't exactly help customers make the right decision.

Just the other day, I heard a sales rep pushing an atom laptop on a customer who wanted to multitask and listen to music because their current computer kept pausing. This is one of those cases where the cheaper AMD A8 laptop I saw would have been better for them.

 

[AtenRa]

Just the other day, I heard a sales rep pushing an atom laptop on a customer who wanted to multitask and listen to music because their current computer kept pausing. This is one of those cases where the cheaper AMD A8 laptop I saw would have been better for them.

Rebates, Intel gives them, AMD doesn't. Easy to understand why he was pushing for the Atom.

edit: And just to let you know how the situation is, recently a Greek hardware distributor decided to completely ditch all AMD products because of the lack of rebates.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Just the other day, I heard a sales rep pushing an atom laptop on a customer who wanted to multitask and listen to music because their current computer kept pausing. This is one of those cases where the cheaper AMD A8 laptop I saw would have been better for them.

Wish the retailers would get sued for this. :'(

 

[crashtech]

Pretty much this, With the exception that I'd argue an equally clocked fx 6xxx still beats a Skylake i3 in MT.

Oh, and it's beyond silly.

Looking at this chart, I think it would be really close, not a big win at all, but maybe a small win (clock for clock).

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

<p>

</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>I know what I need to know. The FX didn't perform as well as it talked.</p>
<p>]

</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>You don't have a clue -- How many FX or Phenom chips have you owned? Because I call total B.S. -- I've owned both and the Vishera 8 core will mop the floor of my older Phenom x6 in anything multithreaded. The thubans hit a brick wall for over locking way too quickly -- But an FX can crank to 5ghz... Performance is way, way better for an enthusiast.</p>

 

[Borealis7]

AMD doesn't use "Cores"...they use COARS! and MOAR of them!

 

[Dresdenboy]

Here is the full text as found at The Register:
http://regmedia.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_bulldozer_lawsuit.pdf

So far a core is expected to execute one instruction at one point in time. 8 cores should do 8 instructions simultaneously according to the document. No word about throughput or latency or if it's still ok, that 8 IDIVs take tens of cycles on each core (but are being executed still).

BTW, beginning with multi cores, there were more and more things to be shared, beginning with the external busses or internal/external memory controllers. L2 caches were shared, L3 later, etc. There is cache coherency traffic, reducing the scaling. And so on.

And in the times of power efficiency, even the power budgets are shared between cores, causing 8 of them not being close to 2 times as fast as 4 cores.

The lawyers will have a lot to learn in this case.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The lawyers will have a lot to learn in this case.

I feel that the outcome may be, that CPUs can no longer be advertised as having "cores". Maybe "core sub-divisions"?

 

[TeknoBug]

I know in Windows it displays half the cores it normally has, such as my FX 4350, I see 2 cores in Windows system info but it really has 4. The cores are rather different, so it's [13] [24] [57] [68] for an FX 8xxx or something like that.

 

[Ferzerp]

IANAL, but I assume the best tactic for the plaintiff here would be to discover the documents leading to the decision to use the term "module" and that a "module" is made up of "two cores". If the decision was engineering driven, it would be difficult to prove any wrongdoing. If that decision is marketing driven however....

Also, considering how they try to obfuscate core counts on mobile parts, I have a strong suspicion which group decided what a "core" is.

 

[Phynaz]

There are AMD fans on this board that insist the 8xxx CPUs are four cores, which are suspiciously absent from this thread.

 

[Magic Carpet]

You don't have a clue -- How many FX or Phenom chips have you owned? Because I call total B.S. -- I've owned both and the Vishera 8 core will mop the floor of my older Phenom x6 in anything multithreaded. The thubans hit a brick wall for over locking way too quickly -- But an FX can crank to 5ghz... Performance is way, way better for an enthusiast.

Vishera not only didn't have 8 proper cores, clock-for-clock it also, regressed in ST performance considerably and was even more power hungrier compared to previous generation. Sure, it did have higher overclocking ceiling and performed better in MT loads (partially due to higher clocks). But how many well multi-threaded apps did we have 4 years ago... Outside of scientific computing and video rendering, not many. I built a few systems for benchmarking purposes, but quickly got rid of them. There were tough sells though. Nobody was interested in playing Handbrake or the like. It wasn't until Piledriver when I began recommending AMD again for budget builds. If anywhere, Vishera excelled at was its outrageous power-consumption in overclocked mode. That was the first-gen Bulldozer for you guys, "the legendary FX series revived", the Ultimate in PC World. What a shame it was, really :thumbsdown: