AMD faces class action lawsuit over Bulldozer core count claims

It looks like AMD has a class action lawsuit on its hands over the company's Bulldozer series of processors. The complaint stems from claims that AMD overstated the number of cores contained in the chip, the lawsuit says that while AMD advertised Bulldozer as having eight cores, it only really had four, due to the unique design, which combined functions of what would be two discrete cores in to one module.

Each module on Bulldozer is seen as two separate cores within Windows. However, the cores share a single FPU, along with the same instruction and execution resources. Intel CPUs on the other hand feature a different design with independent FPUs.

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. The main point here seems to be false advertisement, as not everyone will understand the inner-workings of a CPU and would trust AMD to provide correct specification details.

These are all pretty serious allegations, which would put AMD in violation of the Consumer Legal Remedies Act in the US. The plaintiffs in the case are seeking statutory and punitive damages from AMD. You can find a summary of the lawsuit, HERE.

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KitGuru Says: A lawsuit like this will likely take a couple of years to come to a conclusion, so we could be hearing about this for a while. Do any of you think that AMD misrepresented the core count on its Bulldozer CPU? 

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