AMD Settles Bulldozer Core Count Lawsuit for 12 Million - 35 bucks per chip
Click here to post a comment for AMD Settles Bulldozer Core Count Lawsuit for 12 Million - 35 bucks per chip on our message forum
Undying
It reminds me of nvidia 970 vram settlement where nvidia agreed to pay up 30$ for every user.
rl66
yes, as in most country, law said that it was 3.5 + 0.5 and so is still 4.
the problem was more a communication problem.
if they win they will earn easy money on the back of AMD and of course the consumer isn't in the center of this lawsuit, but the money is (anyway no one care about the result exept them 🙂 )
anticupidon
Guess that I somehow missed my chance of becoming a lawyer. Everything I hear is settling, lawsuit and money.
Oh cramp, why invest so much in tech education?!
Undying
So you didnt get your 30 bucks? :P
Kaarme
Lawsuits like this aren't bad, in my opinion. Companies are all about making money, so sometimes they need to be reminded of the customers' rights. I hope Intel will also lose due to the shameful security issues they have left untouched for years and too many generations of products.
If that was indeed tested in the court of law in some other countries and came back with such a conclusion, it would open interesting business opportunities for unscrupulous manufacturers, thus protected by the law. A good thing it didn't fly in the USA, at least.
Neo Cyrus
I said it the moment they started calling their garbage "cores"; they needed to be sued. What they're paying for their BS, in the end, is chump change, just the cost of doing business. But I suppose we shouldn't be too upset since in the grand scheme of things this is, by far, one of the least egregious things a large company has done then ended up paying squat for. I'm just glad AMD lost and had to pay up, even if it is just symbolic... and US only.
schmidtbag
As much as I find it a bit of a douchey move to have sued AMD when this lawsuit first happened (they were already in debt and these lawyers decide to kick them while they're down and unlikely to pay out?), AMD also did a disservice to people in how they were marketing Bulldozer. Not only was it misleading, but it made the products seem a lot worse than they really were. Take the 8350 for example: its performance typically sat between the 3570K and 3770K, which totally makes sense: it was 4c/8t (which was more than the 3570K had to offer) but it had worse IPC (making it generally slower than the 3770K). As a 4c/8t CPU, it was actually decently competitive. It still left much to be desired (especially considering the wattage) but it wasn't a total disaster. But because AMD advertised it as an 8-core CPU, that made the cores seem a lot weaker than they really were. I think we all would've remembered Bulldozer very differently if it weren't for the marketing.
Anyway, I'm a little confused about the 12.1 million. Is that based on how many chips were sold in the US? Is that the maximum amount AMD owes, or literally how much they actually owe?
Also, apparently that comes out to roughly 345,741 chips.
gx-x
up next: AMD settles infinity fabric lawsuit, admitting it is finite, not infinite.
Andrew LB
That's not how the law works. Everyone owning an Intel chip can't do a massive class action. Every plaintiff must have standing in order to sue. Which means, you have to be able to prove intel's security flaws were the direct cause of you being hacked, and that hacking caused you financial losses. Such a lawsuit is far more difficult compared to the suit in question which is about AMD lying to consumers about how many processor cores their chips have. Everyone who bought a chip thinking it had X cores, when it only had Y cores, had standing.
In the case of AMD though, they definitely got off with a slap on the wrist. Maybe Intel should sue them for anti-competitive behavior since it's clear that many people according to this lawsuit bought AMD chips under false pretenses, and would have spent their money with Intel more than likely if they had known.
Celcius
I've gathered from reading the criticism of the Bulldozer-design over the years that a single floating-point pipeline being shared between every two integer pipelines is the overwhelming reason these cannot possibly be considered "true" cores. While well before my time in personal computing, all of the x86 CPUs, from the 8086 through into at least some of the 80486 designs, had no floating-point pipeline whatsoever. So, I guess these were all examples of a "core-less" processor.
The fact that certain portions of the design are shared doesn't alter the fact that it can execute, in the case of the FX-8000 and 9000 chips, eight threads simultaneously, in actual silicon. While having a one-to-one integer and floating-point pipeline arrangement would have almost certainly improved performance, where is that requirement written down and mandated? AMD never kept the particulars of the processor's internals from the public; I haven't actually checked, but I suspect that if I were to go back and peruse Guru3D's review of the Zambezi, it would indicate just what was below the heat-spreader. It wasn't hidden from anyone who took 2-1/2 minutes to learn about it.
I think this was a lousy outcome. That is because you have a judge and twelve jurors, who I seriously doubt any of which have a degree in microprocessor engineering, essentially defining, going forward, what constitutes a processor "core." Or, at least, what does not. So, as an example, if, a decade from now, Intel, VIA or AMD produce a breakthrough design with 256 discrete floating-point pipelines and a single homogeneous blob of special sauce dubbed the "hive-mind" to handle all the integer what-not, it can still only be marketed as a single "core." At least within California.
AMD was wise to short-circuit this nonsense before both the plaintiff and defendant attorneys were forced to be even more creative in divesting income to prevent finding themselves in an even higher tax-bracket then they undoubtedly already are.
Kaarme
I only know Intel got 32 class action lawsuits against it due to the security issues and the following problems. I have no idea what has happened to the lawsuits since, though, so I assumed they are still being processed. I might be totally wrong, however, and you are correct by saying that's not how the law works and judges dismissed them all. I don't really see you stating that unambiguously in your post. Maybe the results (or pending states) could be somehow discovered by googling, but a cursory glance didn't reveal anything.
Neo Cyrus
Unless you really have some serious multi-threaded work to do, stick with the 3900X. Especially if you're going to be just mostly gaming with just a bit of work on the side.
Even with the current gen of consoles being 8 core x86 chips, which the developers have to squeeze every drop of power out of, for the PC ports, instead of just leaving the code 8 threaded, they shit on them making sure they're only 1-4 threaded. Seems like malicious intent, paid by Intel to me. But what do I know, anything that's not a 100% fact is a conspiracy, and should never be stated, ever, 🙄 even though 99/100 times such obvious horseshit ends up being true rather than just sheer stupidity reaching new, unheard of, levels. Very VERY rarely do they properly use more threads than 1-4, often it's just 1-2 threads being used for the overwhelming bulk of the strain, then the rest with tiny little other processes that take no power.
I do a bunch of multi-threaded work and I question if I'll really need the 3900X I ordered, which I ordered about 14 years ago, thanks Amazon.
Funny guy. I hope you end up buying a CPU without an FPU and then not complain about it being marketed as a CPU. 😀 Then end that day with buying some ice cream that turns out is not made with any cream, just the excretions of CEOs, making money off of suckers who are too pussy to complain about scumbaggery.
If I was in the US and somehow ended up with a BSdozer chip, I would have definitely joined a class action lawsuit.
rl66
It's for that there is international specialist, imagine a world with all the stupid law action and result merged... stupid collective lawsuit against a fastfood for a worm in french fries like in the US and the stupid 30000 Euro against the one that found out the worm because he has diffused the info to make a collective like in the EU, and i forget the life in jail because it could be in a country under charia law and if you can't pay you go directely to jail... it would be like a hell world.
Kaarme
The USA is chock-full of idiotic lawsuits, the worst of them being presented by the patent trolls the USA absolutely cherishes. I wasn't talking about their overdeveloped and bloated justice system in general, I was just referring to this single case. AMD tried to cut corners without making it clear. Intel did the same thing, keeping the security holes in place for great many years because they granted their CPUs some extra, cheap performance, and above all they didn't need to spend money to fix them. It's like a car where the airbags would only work 80% of the time but were 30% cheaper for the manufacturer. No big deal, let's just keep using them until the media makes a big deal out of it. In fact I seem to vaguely recall some Japanese brand suffering an incident like that...
