It seems chipmaker AMD is currently in hot water as the company has a class action lawsuit in its hands. Allegedly, AMD had tricked its customers by overstating the number of cores contained in its chips. The lawsuit says that while the company's Bulldozer advertised to having eight cores for its series of processors, it only really has four functioning cores in play.
AMD's Bulldozer CPUs feature a unique design, which combined the functions of what would be two discrete cores into one module. According to reports, each module has two separate cores in Windows. However, the cores are sharing a single floating-point unit and instruction and execution resources.
Furthermore, the lawsuit claims that the design of Bulldozer means that the cores are not capable of working independently. This result in performance degradation as it is not able to execute eight instructions independently at the same time.
This would mean that AMD has committed a false advertisement over the number of cores its Bulldozer CPUs was supposed to have since not everyone is capable of understanding the complexity and design of the company's processors.
Reportedly, the allegation would put the company in violation of the Consumer Legal Remedies Act in the United States, as the company did not convey accurate specifications that have misled to tens of thousands of its consumers into buying its Bulldozer CPU that is not capable of performing as a true 8-core CPU would. AMD has also violated California's Unfair Competition Law and was guilty of false advertisement, fraud, and breach of express warranty, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment.
In essence, the lawsuit is asking the court to define the meaning of a core and manufacturers should be counting them. Vendors occasionally overstate core counts as a marketing strategy to sell their chips. On the other hand, settling the issue in a courtroom to declare the relative performance between companies would be a much bigger issue than the one currently at hand.
