Tony Dickey filed a class action lawsuit against chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) over charges that the company misleads buyers on the number of cores on its Bulldozer-based CPUs.
Dickey filed the case on Oct. 26 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, reports Legalnewsline. He charged AMD with violating the Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the Unfair Competition Law of the state, false advertising, breach of express warrant, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.
Engadget reports that AMD allegedly advertises the CPUs have eight cores, but effectively it only has four because every core was just half of a module and could not operate independently. Dickey says that AMD stripped away components from two cores and mixed what was left to make a single module.
The result is material performance degradation wherein the Bulldozer part could not handle as many simultaneous instructions as users expect in a design with real eight cores in gaming PC or server. Dickey points out that the average PC buyer do not have the necessary technical expertise to understand AMD's design of processors because they trust the tech firm to provide accurate specifications on its CPUs.
While AMD has yet to comment on the lawsuit, Engadget notes that Zen, its next architecture, offers a more conventional approach by focusing on simultaneous code threads within each core, similar to Intel's Hyperthreading.
That would mean the Zen would have a larger processor, but it should be faster and remove doubts on what a core represents.