01-25-2019, 01:59 AM
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/28...d-to-trial
Quote:I wrote about this lawsuit back when it was filed in 2015 and my opinion hasn’t changed in the intervening 3+ years. That article also deals with the specific claims Dickey made against AMD in his original case and why they were variously inaccurate or inapplicable. In this case, AMD’s counter-claim that “a significant majority interpret ‘core’ in ways that are fully consistent with AMD’s chips,” was deemed an insufficient reason not to certify the class lawsuit.
What Dickey and Parmer are actually arguing is that Bulldozer/Piledriver (the FX-9590, specifically) did not deliver the performance they expected from an eight-core CPU relative to Intel CPUs. They argue that the shared resources in the Bulldozer core prevented the chip from “simultaneously multi-tasking” and that because resources were shared between the CPU cores, that Bulldozer “functionally only have four cores.” Both of these claims are factually wrong.
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Unlike Cell, any single Bulldozer core was capable of running all of the workloads that eight Bulldozer cores were capable of running. Performance clearly scaled with access to additional threads, and other CPU designs from other companies that clearly marketed themselves based on core count were available at a variety of performance levels on a per-core basis. There’s a potential way to draw a distinctive definition out of all this, but you wouldn’t do it using the characteristics advanced by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit.
Dickey and Parmer may be angry that they bought eight-core CPUs that didn’t perform like eight-core CPUs from Intel. That doesn’t mean Bulldozer wasn’t an eight-core chip. Having a certain number of cores does not guarantee a given level of performance.