AMD responds to Bulldozer class action lawsuit

Over the weekend, we learned that AMD had been hit with a class action lawsuit over its Bulldozer series of processors. The complaint stemmed from claims that AMD overstated the number of cores contained in the chip, stating that while AMD advertised the CPU as having eight cores, it only really had four due to a unique design that combined two discrete cores in to a single 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 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. After a few days, AMD has had a chance to issue a comment regarding the matter. In a statement sent out to various press outlets, AMD said: “We believe our marketing accurately reflects the capabilities of the Bulldozer architecture which, when implemented in an 8-core AMD FX processor, is capable of running eight instructions concurrently.”

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KitGuru Says: AMD has now had a chance to deny that it misrepresented its Bulldozer CPUs, now we just have to wait and see how this plays out in the long run. Do any of you think that AMD misrepresented the core count on its Bulldozer CPU? 

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