AMD hit with deceptive marketing lawsuit over Bulldozer chip core claims

Now AMD dispute these claims, stating the design of these modules has minimal affect on their chip’s performance.

AMD has yet to provide official comment on the class action suit, but what’s interesting is how the company seems to be veering away from modular chip architecture like what consumers get from the Bulldozer processors.

Each module is identified as two separate cores in Windows, but the cores share a single floating point unit and instruction and execution resources.

The difference is a highly technical one, which is part of the reason for the class action suit. This is different from Intel’s cores, which feature independent FPUs. You can see the AMD Bulldozer die shot below from our AMD FX-8150 processor review back in 20011. The lawsuit was filed with the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California’s San Jose division, alleging that AMD intentionally falsely advertised those CPUs as having more cores than they actually do.

In fact, the Bulldozer chips functionally have only four cores – not eight, as advertised. The nature of the case means that AMD could be charged for false advertising, breach of express warrant, fraud, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.

The claimant is seeking damages, including punitive and statutory, litigation expenses, pre and post judgment interest and other injunctive and declaratory relief.

The lawsuit (via: Ars Technica) goes on to claim that due to this design, each core is not capable of working independently, which apparently results in performance degradation. Because AMD did not convey accurate specifications, Dickey argues that tens of thousands of consumers have been misled into buying Bulldozer CPUs that can not perform the way a true eight-core CPU would. In actuality, the company constructed the SoC by streamlining components from two cores and meshing them to produce a single module, which meant the CPU cores did not work independently.