AMD Agrees To Pay Out $35 Per Chip Over FX Marketing Lawsuit

[mr moose]

So when the courts find in favor of consumers on tech related stuff we all congratulate them, but when they find something like this all of a sudden they are ignorant?

 

I was under the impression the reason they had expert testimony was to inform the judge of the technicalities from a knowledgeable standpoint, thus the judge doesn't have to be an expert, they just have to know if the expert is being reasonable given the counter arguments etc.

 

 

[RejZoR]

Despite all the whining, Bulldozer chips were still 8 cores. That's just a fact. They were just a bit crappy at it coz these 8 cores shared the computation units. Whining that they weren't "real" 8 cores is about as stupid as calling CPU's "not real X cores" today because they share L3 cache or something. But oh well.

[Trixanity]

5 hours ago, mr moose said:

So when the courts find in favor of consumers on tech related stuff we all congratulate them, but when they find something like this all of a sudden they are ignorant?

 

I was under the impression the reason they had expert testimony was to inform the judge of the technicalities from a knowledgeable standpoint, thus the judge doesn't have to be an expert, they just have to know if the expert is being reasonable given the counter arguments etc.

 

 

It's a settlement. There was no ruling. 

You seem to be on a roll with the pasta in these threads lately. 

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

It's a settlement. There was no ruling. 

Comments were made concerning the would be decision of the judges had it gone to court,  comments have been made regrading the way the ruling should be ruled. 

 

Quote

You seem to be on a roll with the pasta in these threads lately. 

 

You seem to have a problem with my posting, take it up with mod.  

EDIT: also 2 people agreed and one liked my comment,  so it seems my message is not out of line.

[Trixanity]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

Comments were made concerning the would be decision of the judges had it gone to court,  comments have been made regrading the way the ruling should be ruled. 

 

 

You seem to have a problem with my posting, take it up with mod.  

Well, you usually settle when the risk of losing a case is likely and when in the event you do it could be costly. When you're going into court arguing whether or not something is a core I could imagine it could swing either way considering the loose definition.

 

As for your posting: it's not against the rules so why would I contact a mod? It's not kindergarten either. Just curious about why I'm reading roughly the same post multiple times a week. I noticed a pattern; that's all.

[mr moose]

Just now, Trixanity said:

Well, you usually settle when the risk of losing a case is likely and when in the event you do it could be costly. When you're going into court arguing whether or not something is a core I could imagine it could swing either way considering the loose definition.

I didn't contest that.

 

Just now, Trixanity said:

As for your posting: it's not against the rules so why would I contact a mod? It's not kindergarten either. Just curious about why I'm reading roughly the same post multiple times a week. I noticed a pattern; that's all.

Maybe you should put me on your ignore list. 

[Trixanity]

Just now, mr moose said:

I didn't contest that.

 

Maybe you should put me on your ignore list. 

That's the answer to your question why people are critical of where the ruling could easily have steered towards had it gone to trial.

 

No thanks.

[TechyBen]

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

So when the courts find in favor of consumers on tech related stuff we all congratulate them, but when they find something like this all of a sudden they are ignorant?

 

I was under the impression the reason they had expert testimony was to inform the judge of the technicalities from a knowledgeable standpoint, thus the judge doesn't have to be an expert, they just have to know if the expert is being reasonable given the counter arguments etc.

 

 

Yep. Sometimes it swings the wrong way. Did AMD lie? Did other companies brands? You seem to be suggesting all companies should either be found guilty every time, or innocent every time?

 

Or should it be a case by case thing?

 

I've rarely seen expert testimony actually hit the subject in court. They seem to be experts... but mention unrelated facts. Facts mind, but not those dependent on the case.

[TechyBen]

56 minutes ago, Tedny said:

wait, AMD lost it? But those CPU's have 8 core...... It just windows see them like 4 core and 8 threads 

Ah. That may change things then. If the OS cannot really make much use of the secondary cores with that shared cache, then they would perform (functionally) much closer to a "hyper thread", using spare resources, not an entire CPU resource chain. Hmmmm.

[porina]

I read the earlier comment along the lines of, people tend to interpret something as positive or negative depending on which one better suits their opinion on the topic. We're all guilty of that to some degree.

 

I'm not US (or anywhere else) legal expert. Please correct if wrong, I understood that in the US there isn't a "loser pays winners costs" system like in UK? If that is correct, then even if you win, you're still out of pocket on lawyer fees and time taken. It makes sense to settle if that is going to be cheaper and get rid of a distraction faster, letting you get on with more important business.

[mr moose]

18 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

That's the answer to your question why people are critical of where the ruling could easily have steered towards had it gone to trial.

I think you might have misunderstood me then.  There seems to be a lot of people questioning the judicial system on these forums, except when the judicial system finds in favor of their opinion.  So my question is not why did they come to an agreement, but why does it seem people think it changes between just and fair and ignorant depending on the outcome?

 

18 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

No thanks.

Then drop the irrelevant criticism of my posts.  If you think I am being irrelevant, repetitive or ion some way deteriorating the forum, then report the post, otherwise go away.

 

 

13 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Yep. Sometimes it swings the wrong way. Did AMD lie? Did other companies brands? You seem to be suggesting all companies should either be found guilty every time, or innocent every time?

No,  I have said nothing of the sort.    My post was about the inconstant way in which this forum seems to treat the judicial system depending on the outcome.

 

13 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Or should it be a case by case thing?

It's always a case by case thing.

13 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

I've rarely seen expert testimony actually hit the subject in court. They seem to be experts... but mention unrelated facts. Facts mind, but not those dependent on the case.

 

The courts and those fighting in them call for expert witnesses all the time.   

 

 

[TechyBen]

13 minutes ago, mr moose said:

There seems to be a lot of people questioning the judicial system on these forums

 

 

Averages are not individual points. Individual points are not averages. We can all swap back and forth over "but they said, they they said" on a forum with multiple opinions and factual viewpoints (yes, facts can have multiple valid solutions, but the choice of each one could then be an opinion, but both valid).

 

A lot of people get annoyed/offended here when someone posts "you always say that" as if this forum is a unified creature or person.

 

Quote

 My post was about the inconstant way in which this forum seems to treat the judicial system depending on the outcome.

Again... how and what is this communal person in this forum? Why keep treating it like one single person? What?

 

Quote

The courts and those fighting in them call for expert witnesses all the time.   

Yeah. But those that reach the news, always seem to say strange things. Like they had ulterior motives. I guess that does not happen in smaller cases, with less money/fame/pride being thrown around.

[Trixanity]

25 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I think you might have misunderstood me then.  There seems to be a lot of people questioning the judicial system on these forums, except when the judicial system finds in favor of their opinion.  So my question is not why did they come to an agreement, but why does it seem people think it changes between just and fair and ignorant depending on the outcome?

 

Then drop the irrelevant criticism of my posts.  If you think I am being irrelevant, repetitive or ion some way deteriorating the forum, then report the post, otherwise go away.

 

 

No,  I have said nothing of the sort.    My post was about the inconstant way in which this forum seems to treat the judicial system depending on the outcome.

 

It's always a case by case thing.

 

The courts and those fighting in them call for expert witnesses all the time.   

 

 

Because people have opinions. People have knowledge. They're questioning the decision making of courts when the very outcome can be determined by where and who preside over the case.

They criticize the merits on which some rule in these cases because we've seen people who get expert counseling that still don't grasp the subject on even a basic level.

 

I can't and won't report a post when it's not against the rules; I've told you this already. However just as you're free to comment on them, I'm free to comment on you. Ultimately we're accomplishing the same: nothing.

[RasmusDC]

10 hours ago, Sharkyx1 said:

So stupid to have a lawsuit over this

yes i agree that it is stupid with the lawsuit culture .. being outrage about everything, and lawyers earning lots of money on it.

 

but i really do not think it is a problem to hit down on false marketing, i really don´t like that it is okay in marketing to lie to sell elements, you might get a product, but it is cheating..

 

i know f.ex. Semper the baby food manufacturer has been in a fight in Denmark, selling baby food calling it organic, without it being organic, and calling it healthy even though it was chips.. 

 

they have been hit hard, and if they don´t change there product information, then .. all there products will be illigal to sell in Denmark, although this is not public lawsuits, but the goverment, who then ware sued by Semper, for blocking selling of items.

 

you have to be able to trust labels, and not have them misleading you as a consumer. 

 

somehow it became okay to "lie" about everything, and people being mad, was just because they were stupid.. lying about fuel consumption (well you ought to know, because all manufacturers lie) lie about healthy foods, lie about performance in general.

 

clickbaiting, is also in on way lying, and i really don´t like that either, because it is completely wasting my time, and adding value to something, because i pushed it.. because of a lie.... 

[Drak3]

1 hour ago, Tedny said:

so how AMD lost this, I don't know 

They settled out, but they could easily lose due to the judge not knowing the technicalities of CPU designing.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Tedny said:

but those cores still a cores, so how AMD lost this, I don't know 

 

12 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

They settled out, but they could easily lose due to the judge not knowing the technicalities of CPU designing.

 

Courts make rulings based on the law and facts presented. What we see as the headline reason for the case is not necessarily the same as the legal argument. Without digging in the detail, how this might have gone will come down to exactly what AMD promised, and how it is interpreted in a legal context. 

[cluelessgenius]

wait so only if i bought from amds site or in california? thats bull-shit. i bought 2 of those damn 8120s and i would definitly want to collect. those were garbage looking back at it.

[Arika]

2 hours ago, Tedny said:

but those cores still a cores, so how AMD lost this, I don't know 

for the same reason NVidia lost the GTX970 lawsuit regarding VRAM, sure it technically had 4GB, but the other 500mb was not used in the regular pipeline and therefore only effectively had 3.5GB. But 4GB physically present and "used", but again, they also lost.

 

 

[LAwLz]

12 hours ago, Drak3 said:

The only reason to do this is to avoid the likely chance that the courts have no understanding of technology. AMD was in the right prior, and they shouldn't be paying for the misunderstanding of a handful of consumers.

I disagree.

If advertisement makes the average confused and jump to the wrong conclusion then it's disingenuous and I like to see the consumer get protected.

 

Consumer protection laws exist for a reason. You can't expect the average Joe to be an expert in every field. Just because I don't know a lot about cars doesn't mean it should be allowed to take advantage of that lack of knowledge in advertisements.

 

I see this as a victory for consumers, because it hopefully scares other companies off from trying to create deceptive marketing material in the future. It's a shame that this happened to AMD now that things are finally going well for them, but I think it's good that the law stepped in and protected consumers.

 

I'm just surprised that it happened with the FX cores rather than the bullshit marketing AMD tried to pull with "compute cores". They started combining the CPU and GPU cores in some processors. So you could buy a "6 compute core CPU" which turned out to be a dual core with 4 GPU cores.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Tedny said:

you know, if they just would say - cache is not part of core, but complement system and they would won 

It's not just cache that was shared between the "cores" though.

It was the fetch, the decode, the FP scheduler, the i-cache, and L2 cache that were shared between each integer core inside each module.

 

And it's not up to AMD to decide what is and isn't part of a core, or "complement system".

Just like it wasn't up to Nvidia if the 4GB of VRAM in the 970 was actually 4GB or misleading marketing.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The problem with what AMD was doing was they were trying to claim that a CPU core was only the back-end part of a CPU, and even then a specific part of the back-end. I argue that a CPU core needs to have both a front-end (the part that reads/decodes/issues instructions) and a back-end.

 

On top of this, AMD was claiming that clustered multithreading, which is what they called how Bulldozer processes threads, was supposed to be better than SMT:

 

 

This is a pretty bold claim. And yet when push came to shove, none of it really came into fruition as much they claimed.

 

So on top of them trying to tell people what a CPU core is, they were promising gains that never really happened.

[TechyBen]

4 hours ago, Tedny said:

but those cores still a cores, so how AMD lost this, I don't know 

Yeah. I really don't like the current trend of "4GHz CPU" when it's multi core, 1 or 2 cores hit 4GHz, the rest 3.5... IMO it should be (on the packets/packaging) "3.5Ghz + 2x4Ghz" or some similar method of min/max/average, or the number of cores hitting it/each.

 

I still agree, AMD said "8 cores", and it was. They did not say "64bit" when it was 32, or "8mb cache" when it was 2mb... The cores were slow/shared/smaller than Intel's, but they were still cores.

 

If however, the OS treats them only as threads, in a similar way to HT "cores", then on a useage case, they would not perform as cores. If it was purely a math/compute limitation, then IMO, they were slower compute, and that is down to the consumer to check (same as a Pentium 4 2 core (yes they made those!) at 3GHz is not quicker than the latest i3 with 2 cores running at 2.9Ghz...).

 

If we have a go at AMD, do we also have to do the same for every Intel chip that performs slower despite having the same "GHz" rating? The intel Atom chips, Pentium/Celerons and i3s that run slower/compute less than the i7 clocked at the same?

 

I can agree that this is similar to what NVidia did. If that part of the product is not usable to the consumer, then it is false advertising. Even intel know to be careful with their server 32+ core processors, to not advertise them as being "more powerful" than the i7 12 cores... but more power efficient, IOPS supporting/PCIe lane providing etc instead.

 

Still, unlike the NVidia example, where there was no way the consumer could know in advance that last .5gb of ram was useless, AMD was honest in that it was a half integer compute core... they were honest these were shared. Just as Intel were honest it's "hyperthreading"... yet I don't see anyone suing Intel because not all compute was "up to 30% gains in performance".

[Trixanity]

31 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

The problem with what AMD was doing was they were trying to claim that a CPU core was only the back-end part of a CPU, and even then a specific part of the back-end. I argue that a CPU core needs to have both a front-end (the part that reads/decodes/issues instructions) and a back-end.

 

On top of this, AMD was claiming that clustered multithreading, which is what they called how Bulldozer processes threads, was supposed to be better than SMT:

 

 

This is a pretty bold claim. And yet when push came to shove, none of it really came into fruition as much they claimed.

 

So on top of them trying to tell people what a CPU core is, they were promising gains that never really happened.

For all we know it could be good or even better if done right. Bulldozer was a lesson in very poor execution; you could even call it a case study in classic AMD. We'll never know unless someone with the resources and competence tries something with the paradigm. I find it unlikely though because how much it failed and SMT has been proven to work very well. Of course there's an equal chance that it's just impossible to make work as intended. 

[TechyBen]

I think it was more a different way of doing it to SMT, and it just being a different type of benefit, one that was not universally beneficial. AMDs Buldozer example, meant you always knew how much compute each "thread" had (1/2 ) for each core, and could scale accordingly. In a SMT system, it depends on what the other thread is doing, and how much resources it uses up, it would be "between 3% - 30%". Where as AMDs was "always 15%" (as a made up example).

 

So AMDs example failed, because having the boost much higher some of the time, turns out better for general compute (and I guess most server farms too), than having a small increase all the time.

[thorhammerz]

5 hours ago, mr moose said:

No,  I have said nothing of the sort.    My post was about the inconstant way in which this forum seems to treat the judicial system depending on the outcome.

Consistently inconsistent?  

 

Beyond the superficial facades, people ultimately look out for, and be supportive of, only that which might provide immediate benefit themselves. And consistency is rarely one of those things.