Allen
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Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,854
Ohio USA
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AMD settles Bulldozer CPU lawsuit
AMD has settled a false advertising lawsuit that was launched in the US in 2015 by writing a $12.1 million cheque
AMD was accused of false advertising, fraud, breach of express warrant, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.
[Lawsuit argued that AMD Bulldozer 8-core] could not perform eight [floating point] calculations simultaneously and should have been described and advertised as a 4-core chip.
Each customer who bought a bulldozer chip will get $35 per chip bought.
As noted by a response to the Article:
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It's not that simple as "it should have been described and advertised as a 4-core chip", it performed as a 4-core chip on floating point tasks, and as a 8-core chip on integer tasks.
AMD designed Bulldozer that way because it believed most uses emphasized "integer" calculations and "floating point" was only used occasionally during a program. To AMD it was a logical design choice to increase CPU operating frequency. I think they may have intended to get to clocks in the 6GHz to 8GHz range eventually.
Nonetheless, even I (an AMD fan) believed Bulldozer took the wrong approach. Materials Science and materials for integrated circuits (CPUs) being one of my Engineering Science specialties, I realized practical-desktop PC GHz much above 5GHz was not too feasible with Silicon (I posted a "joke" video on this site making fun of Bulldozer when it came out). As we all know, AMD lost hundreds of millions due to low CPU sales for several years.
