[Ars] AMD sued over allegedly misleading Bulldozer core count

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

Anyone remember those "Why buy a 32-bit PlayStation for $299 when you can buy a 64-bit Jaguar for $149" ads from the 90s? If AMD ran any adverts like those, implying that their cores were directly comparable to (and by implication, superior to) Intel's, then they might be in some amount of trouble (albeit probably nothing major). Otherwise, I don't expect this'll go anywhere.

Yeah and Atari didn't get sued -- when their 64 bit marketing campaign was a much larger disaster by comparison.

ExtremeTech already called this lawsuit out as total garbage, rightfully so.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...lse-bulldozer-chip-marketing-is-without-merit

To quote them:
If the writeup at Legalnewsline.com is remotely accurate, the lawsuit is utterly without technical merit. The suit supposedly alleges that because Bulldozer shares certain core resources, the cores can no longer work independently and the chip is no longer capable of performing eight instructions simultaneously. If that’s the hook Dickey is hoping to hang his lawsuit on, he picked a bad one. While it’s true that AMD shared core resources within Bulldozer, the chip doesn’t work the way Dickey alleges it does.

 

[mrmt]

Interesting how AMD has been pissing off their consumers to the point they are suing the company because of the poor performance of their products.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Interesting how AMD has been pissing off their consumers to the point they are suing the company because of the poor performance of their products.

Trolling.

 

[TheELF]

1: You need a HyperThreading enable Operating System for HT to work properly/efficiently. HT on Win 2K was a nightmare and HT is not working with Win 95/98.

2:You also need a Multi-Threaded application or Multi-Tasking environment/workload for HT to really perform at the level it was intended.

3. HSA hardware(Kaveri) was only released last year (2014)

That is exactly my point, anyone that is using a modern OS will have benefits from HT reaching up to double the performance,especially when running game threads that where designed for a 1.5Ghz -almost an ARM- athlon.

HSA is almost 2 years in existence and nobody bothers with it...

 

[Dresdenboy]

I still maintain that their resource sharing scheme is an awful lot like hyper-threading and intel doesn't count hyper-threading as cores. From a consumer standpoint, this certainly seems like an intentional misrepresentation of the product along the lines of what VW has done with their diesel emissions. I stopped using amd in my own systems when intel released core2duo. I did use a 1090t in my youngest sons system and it performs very well.

An "awful lot" doesn't fit. The frontend could provide more instructions than the cores were capable to process. And with the plaintiffs single threaded iTunes there surely was no problem with shared resources at all. If the actually Piledriver's FP units and caches had longer latencies than K10, it's no wonder that iTunes behaved so badly even vs. a Phenom.

A Dieselgate comparison doesn't apply here, BTW. I'm involved in both businesses. ^^
How about 4 cylinder vs. 8 cylinder engine comparisons with different cylinder volumes instead?

 

[Dresdenboy]

That is exactly my point, anyone that is using a modern OS will have benefits from HT reaching up to double the performance,especially when running game threads that where designed for a 1.5Ghz -almost an ARM- athlon.

HSA is almost 2 years in existence and nobody bothers with it...

GCC 6 will support it. Patches are rolling out right now.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

That is exactly my point, anyone that is using a modern OS will have benefits from HT reaching up to double the performance,especially when running game threads that where designed for a 1.5Ghz -almost an ARM- athlon.

HSA is almost 2 years in existence and nobody bothers with it...

I suspect that HSA will be bigger for mobile than desktop. When ARM based hardware that supports HSA starts arriving, I'd expect a lot more apps begin using it. With HSA, Cuda, Etc all kicking around -- there is a sea of competing optimizations for developers... Right now its clear they are focusing on the more common ones (not hsa).

 

[svenge]

HSA is almost 2 years in existence and nobody bothers with it...

Why should developers even bother with HSA in the x86 sector, given that the products capable of utilizing it have such a minimal market share and install base?

 

[crashtech]

HSA would be an interesting addition to Intel CPUs, now that their iGPUs are becoming more respectable.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Intel won't support HSA, since OpenCL 2.0 supports nearly the same features anyway. Though I am told that Intel's OpenCL drivers are not a treat to work with just yet . . . granted, that could be very wrong (or just dated).

 

[throwa]

Class-action lawsuits are worthless and a joke.

The only people who make any money are the attorneys involved. The actual victims or "class members" get a small pittance, usually a tiny check for $2-$15.

There's a reason attorneys are "super eager" to start class-actions and offer "free" representation, and it ain't out of the goodness of their hearts. There is serious money to be made in attorneys fees, sometimes in the millions.

 

[Puffnstuff]

The individual settlement varies with each case and depends on several factors which leaves it looking like total amount of settlement - attorney fees / number of claims against the settlement. When I received my settlement from Toyota for the unintended acceleration case I received around $150 for my claim. Toyota needs to be involved in another one over their air injection pumps and the outrageous cost to replace them when they are part of the emissions system and should be under a 10 year warranty to begin with.

 

[crashtech]

Like AMD has any money for this. If we could only monetize some trumped-up screwing-over perpetrated by Intel, I'd be on board for a free CPU!

 

[Vortex6700]

Like AMD has any money for this. If we could only monetize some trumped-up screwing-over perpetrated by Intel, I'd be on board for a free CPU!

The last time Intel committed 12 federal crimes with damages exceeding 20 billion and they were fined 65 million. The scheme cost them 1 billion to begin with.

Never expect honesty, fair business practices, or justice from Intel. Expect them to win.

 

[Phynaz]

The last time Intel committed 12 federal crimes with damages exceeding 20 billion and they were fined 65 million. The scheme cost them 1 billion to begin with.

Never expect honesty, fair business practices, or justice from Intel. Expect them to win.

Citation needed. Or better yet, keep this an AMD thread, there's already two about Intel.

 

[arcenite]

Man this thread reminds me of the days when AMD was on top

 

[svenge]

Man this thread reminds me of the days when AMD was on top

Ten years ago?

 

[throwa]

Man this thread reminds me of the days when AMD was on top

Oddly enough, my first ever gaming PC was using that trusty AMD 3200+ , reliable little guy that chip was! 2004-2008 were good years for AMD.

That chip saw me through late Vanilla WoW into about half-way into Burning Crusade. 5-6 hours a night and more on weekends. Ah, the memories.....

Unfortunately, it was a crappy pre-built/Walmart machine that I had simply modified with a new PSU and dGPU. Then one night during some 5-mans the motherboard unexpectedly went "poof" and took processor with it. I smelled a strong "burnt plastic" smell and knew right away the rig was done for.

 

[arcenite]

Ten years ago?

Opteron 165 FTW!

 

[svenge]

Opteron 165 FTW!

Yeah, that was one of the last good AMD CPUs. Dual-core Denmark goodness...

I myself had a somewhat less-ambitious AMD build at the time with a single-core Athlon 64 3700+ (San Diego).

 

[arcenite]

Oddly enough, my first ever gaming PC was using that trusty AMD 3200+ , reliable little guy that chip was! 2004-2008 were good years for AMD.

That chip saw me through late Vanilla WoW into about half-way into Burning Crusade. 5-6 hours a night and more on weekends. Ah, the memories.....

Unfortunately, it was a crappy pre-built/Walmart machine that I had simply modified with a new PSU and dGPU. Then one night during some 5-mans the motherboard unexpectedly went "poof" and took processor with it. I smelled a strong "burnt plastic" smell and knew right away the rig was done for.

The first AMD chip I ever had... K6-2 400 maybe? No! It was the 450! My first "gaming rig" was of the Pentium 133 mmx variety. *sigh* First PC was 486DX2(IIRC) IBM PS/2. I remember the first time I hooked up a 'modern' CRT monitor that supported a decent resolution (1024x768 maybe?) I couldn't believe the difference. And zomg 24bit color.

Edit: I also vividly remember my first experience with overclocking -- my dad's Pentium 90 machine. I opened up the computer and noticed a jumper that set the CPU to either 90mhz or 100mhz. I set it to 100 and turned it on. The computer never worked after that

 

[myocardia]

I am sure there is one of these posters in every shop that sells these laptops...

Not yet, but there will be in a few months.

 

[Puffnstuff]

My first amd cpu was the 5x86 which dusted off the Pentium 100 for a lot less money. Too bad that amd can't deliver similar performance these days. I'd love to have something from them that could trounce the latest intel offerings for less money. I'd be willing to give them the same cash if the performance warranted it like when the slot a Athlons were released.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

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.

Epic fail in the first sentence. Vishera has 8 proper integer cores -- and the Jaguar CPU's in the Xbox One / PS4 have 8 cores each with integer and fpu.

Ignorance of the actual architecture will be why this lawyer has very little chance of winning this lawsuit.

A question I'd like to ask this idiot who is suing AMD -- how exactly do you think you'd be able to squeeze an additional 4 floating point units onto a chip fabbed at 32 nm? Because we're all ears. There just doesn't seem to be enough physical real estate IMO.

Zambezi was indeed a slight decline in Single Threaded performance. But it is straight revisionist history to state Thuban was faster at single threaded tasks than the revised Vishera cores. Vishera was faster at stock clocks -- and blew them out of the water once overclocking is factored into the equation. 8 Core Vishera totally wallops the 6 Core Thuban at multithreaded performance.

Phenom II X6 1100T =
Single Threaded Score = 1261 / 5868 Overall

Vishera FX-8350 =
Single Threaded Score = 1505 / 8970 Overall

Source:
http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Phenom+II+X6+1100T&id=394

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-Core&id=1780

 

[jpiniero]

A question I'd like to ask this idiot who is suing AMD -- how exactly do you think you'd be able to squeeze an additional 4 floating point units onto a chip fabbed at 32 nm? Because we're all ears. There just doesn't seem to be enough physical real estate IMO.

Intel did.

I think they have a decent shot at winning. AMD should have used the term modules which most of the tech sites use but they obviously wanted to deceive that it was better than Intel's products.