Friday, November 6th 2015
AMD Dragged to Court over Core Count on "Bulldozer"
This had to happen eventually. AMD has been dragged to court over misrepresentation of its CPU core count in its "Bulldozer" architecture. Tony Dickey, representing himself in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accused AMD of falsely advertising the core count in its latest CPUs, and contended that because of they way they're physically structured, AMD's 8-core "Bulldozer" chips really only have four cores.
The lawsuit alleges that Bulldozer processors were designed by stripping away components from two cores and combining what was left to make a single "module." In doing so, however, the cores no longer work independently. Due to this, AMD Bulldozer cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently as claimed, or the way a true 8-core CPU would. Dickey is suing for damages, including statutory and punitive damages, litigation expenses, pre- and post-judgment interest, as well as other injunctive and declaratory relief as is deemed reasonable.
Source:
LegalNewsOnline
The lawsuit alleges that Bulldozer processors were designed by stripping away components from two cores and combining what was left to make a single "module." In doing so, however, the cores no longer work independently. Due to this, AMD Bulldozer cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently as claimed, or the way a true 8-core CPU would. Dickey is suing for damages, including statutory and punitive damages, litigation expenses, pre- and post-judgment interest, as well as other injunctive and declaratory relief as is deemed reasonable.
511 Comments on AMD Dragged to Court over Core Count on "Bulldozer"
I see it coming: "oh, but Bulldozer is technically only 4-core so a 6-core should be it!" My point, exactly.FPUs were spotty around 1990s simply because it was brand new technology. You could argue Bulldozer was brand new technology too but, at that point, the definition of "core" was pretty well established for 6 years prior to that. The use of the word "core" where it isn't appropriate is why this lawsuit has merit.
Lawsuit in America = I Farted now i'm being sued in a class Action Because i polluted breathing Air:)
Dickey is full of crap here, based on claims. This is a civil suit, and filed based upon a California law which doesn't have many parallels universally recognized throughout the country. As others have stated, this guy is basically taking what may be a couple of hundred dollars of processor and suing AMD for it, magically lost time, legal bills, and everything else. I'm sorry, but if this was actually about lost performance that is being claimed they'd have something more than that. I understand that a judge will only consider the plaintiff's request, but there's a difference between bargaining like this is a used car lot and asking for fair reparations. Whenever somebody asks for $5, and the cost of the original product was $1 they've got to either have an exceptional case or exceptional proof. Their "proof" as yet is a bunch of technical data sheets and block diagrams. www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/9674725/Dickey_v_Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc Hell, the filing fee in this court is $400, which could have bought a new system with an Intel quad core. This isn't about helping consumers, and the money proves it.
Really? I understand wanting to believe that judges have no bias, but what sort of world do you live in? The one I live in has people being named as judges. These people have motivations, such as seeing the best thing done for their community, and delivering their own form of "justice." To the former, suing an ailing company into the ground will have a negative impact on locals. If this were MS, Samsung, or Seagate I'd be less concerned with impartiality. To the later, you have to weigh timing. This person made no effort to get refunded, waited until years after official marketing material was released, hired lawyers from Chicago to represent them in Oakland, and has yet to show any desire or interest in the public good. I'm sorry, but with all that easily demonstrable, it's impossible for a technological hermit to not have an underlying bias when dealing with someone. Judges are human, above all other things.
One last point here. Intel had Pentium 4, and the nutburst...ahem...netburst issues. They got sued, so theoretically you can use that as a basis for the AMD suit. Except, you can't. The reason Intel lost that suit was they manipulated benchmarks to sell their product. They LIED to customers:www.zacks.com/stock/news/153085/intel-settles-pentium-4-lawsuit-by-paying-15-to-customers AMD didn't lie. They may have been optimistic to think that changing the architecture around would allow performance to universally be better, but they released benchmarks which were confirmed by outside sources. Yes, calling them octo-cores is sleazy, but it isn't a lie or marketing altering the truth. AMD's already paid for Bulldozer being a turd with years of poor sales, this is an opportunist trying to make money because AMD is likely to settle and make this go away. Zen is too big of a component of AMD's future to allow a pending lawsuit to tarnish the name. The Chicago lawyers know that, and they're using it to get functionally free money.
Again, read through the lawyer's own page. If you don't want to punch them in the face afterwards you're a far more tolerant person than I.
Edit:So let me get this straight.
On one hand the plaintiff is smart enough to know what components a core entails, based upon the CPU architecture.
On the other hand, the plaintiff is not responsible enough to seek out any information on what is advertised as a completely new architecture. They are assumed to never have seen any information from 2009 to 2015 (look back to the Anandtech link I posted).
This person exists in such a narrow bubble of knowledge and ignorance that they can't possibly exist. It's be like saying a person has eaten hamburgers their entire life, and because of the name they assumed that they were made out of pork. They are now suing McDonalds because they were in fact a unique branch of Hindu, and killing pigs was acceptable but killing cows wasn't.
To say that preposterous statement hurts my cognitive faculties. They want me to drive a rusty spoon through my brain and scoop out my frontal lobe. The US is full of stupid lawsuits, but that doesn't mean we need to find the few examples of when they're true.
Which if anyone is intersted is the reason why MS released a hotfix for the scheduler. in W7
Default core scheduling in Windows is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 but BD/PD ideal scheduling is 1,3,5,7,2,4,6,8 due to the shared cache. They are real cores btw, HT is purely logical.
Just some fyi. :p
www3.epa.gov/airquality/sulfurdioxide/
75 ppb is the official emissions level which cannot be exceeded. This is why the EPA is a good idea, but so poorly implemented as to be a joke.
Edit:
Also @HumanSmoke, you should watch your jokes. From Wikipedia: Since New Zealand produces large amounts of agricultural products, it is in the unique position of having high methane emissions from livestock compared to other greenhouse gas sources. The New Zealand government is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and therefore attempts are being made to reduce greenhouse emissions. To achieve this, an agricultural emissions research levy was proposed, which promptly became known as a "fart tax" or "flatulence tax". It encountered opposition from farmers, farming lobby groups and opposition politicians
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulence
I'd be crying, if I wasn't laughing so hard.
and so for you Americans i fully expect the EPA to prosecute (on behalf of Obunnya) every american for Air Pollution
lets just call this a living Tax to help clear the Deficit :p
Anyhow, I think a discussion on farts makes more sense than whether Mr. Dickey thinks a CPU core has to intrinsically execute one floating point operation per cycle. Can't say I've ever seen that as a prerequisite of a CPU core....which is why I haven't been taking this thread at all seriously.
That's a bold move cotton, lets see how it plays out!
Picture John Doe walking into [insert computer store here] and tells the clerk I want an 8-core processor. The clerk hooks John Doe up with a Bulldozer. He gets home and starts encoding videos on it. He quickly discovers it is no faster than his old Phenom II X6 1055T and starts looking for the reason. He stumbles upon threads like this, block diagrams of Bulldozer, reviews saying Bulldozer underperforms, benchmarks proving the poor performance, and--most importantly--he discovers Intel Core i7-5960X which thoroughly trounces his Bulldozer "8-core." How does John Doe not feel that he was mislead by the clerk, whom was mislead by AMD calling their processors "8-core?"AMD was thinking DirectCompute would negate the need for FPUs. AMD had a sense of euphoria after buying out ATI thinking that it will drastically change how computing is done. They couldn't have had it more wrong.Plaintiffs don't walk into lawsuits not doing their research. There is plenty of failure analyses all over the internet explaining why Bulldozer is a steaming pile of shit.
I'm not going to discuss (rather, attack) the plaintiff. Like I said, there is merit to the complaint and I'm shocked it wasn't done much sooner.There's only 4 L2 caches because there is only 4 cores. The two threads running on the same core require access to all of the L2 because the required data can exist anywhere in there.HT has hardware just like Bulldozer. The only major difference between HD and Bulldozer is AMD added some hardware to the SMT implementation so that integer performance does not suffer. It really shows their lack of knowledge of SMT; hence the horrible implementation. Jim Keller, whom knows a thing or three about SMT came in to set AMD straight with Zen. More cores with SMT is better than cores with SMT that has extra hardware attached.Again, I cite the hard drive lawsuit. Seagate had the technical win (correct use of "GB") but still lost on the surface (Windows doesn't show what Seagate claims). I think Dickey has the technical (>50% of the core is shared between two threads causing bottlenecks) and surface win (nothing suggests Bulldozer "8-core" is really an 8-core).
AMD will try to use "8 integer cores" as a defense. It won't stick because outside of technical documents, "integer" is left out.
AMD say this:
There are two independent integer cores on a single Bulldozer module
Plaintiff says:
Not
I'm outta here.
HT isn't hardware multithreading HT is based around the OS scheduler which can schedule 2 threads to one core using spare cycles, something like that.. I don't knopw the exact science but it's done in software anyway..
The main differnce between BD and Thurban is Thurban has 6 dedicated L2 cache banks each with 1 fetch/decode unit, that's basically it. L2/L1 ram is freaking expensive, plus it takes up room on the die.
Btw the 2 way shared L2 is one of Piledrivers biggest handicaps, if not the biggest. Round trip time between CPU and L3 is super slow, about double that of Thurban or Deneb.
Piledriver has around 27ns L3 latencey, Phenom II is what, 8ns or something? I could check.....
Hence overclocking L3 does nothing to improve performance as it did on Phenom II..
If you put an X6 and an 8320 head to head I imagine the X6 will rape the 8320, as you pointed out earlier, but only up to 6 threads. After that PD is gonna pull ahead.
I wouldn't be surprised if x264 wasn't running 8 threads...? Did they say how many?
But hey that was 4-5 years ago, now with everything mutithreaded......things have changed the archetecture was way ahead of it's time......
Also corect me uif I'm wrong but wasn't BD originally designed as a server chip?
sorry about my spelling, spellcheck isn't working.. :p