AMD faces class action suit over Bulldozer missrepresentation

[harrynowl]

the "dude" kinda' has a point, because even if the module has 2 clusters, it has only one FPU

1 flexFPU that acts as 2 independent 128bit units if both pipelines are processing an instruction. downside is 256bit AVX operations need to then take 2 passes of the pipeline... which is long so its nice and sloow.

 

2 pipelines, 2 alus, 2 fpus

 

1 frontend (fetch/decode/schedule*).

[juretrn]

Mmmmmm. I don't think so. The ALU is obviously the actual thing that's important. Its the thing that does the arithmetic calculations and make logical comparisons such as less than and greater than. In contrast, a FPU shared between two cores wouldn't be a bottleneck at all. There are very few tasks that even hammer the FPU in the first place so once again, the problem I believe in Bulldozer came from something to do with latency and the CPU cache. 

I also distinctly remember that once upon a time a FPU was a FEATURE of a processor... the kind of thing you put on the product brief to brag about.

[deviant88]

Leave AMD alone mfkers.... find another target for your handthrown bullshit.

Thats what i would say to the article writers ofcourse.

[Dabombinable]

I also distinctly remember that once upon a time a FPU was a FEATURE of a processor... the kind of thing you put on the product brief to brag about.

Well it wasn't needed by everyone back then.

[Dabombinable]

Leave AMD alone mfkers.... find another target for your handthrown bullshit.

Thats what i would say to the article writers ofcourse.

Oh bugger off, if a company deserves shit they are going to get it.

[LAwLz]

I agree that's marketing bullshit - but all the specs are listed and can be easily found. For what it's worth, almost all phone soc producers are pulling the same bs, think of when apple claimed the ipad has a "quad core gpu" whatever that meant.

Phone SoC produces are not pulling the same shit (Except Motorola with the X8).

There is a difference between saying your GPU is a quad core (which it might very well be), and counting all the cores together and only advertising that.

 

What AMD is doing (was doing?) with their APUs is exactly as if Intel had advertised the i5-2500K as a 16-core chip. That's bullshit and only there to trick consumers. You should list the CPU cores and GPU cores separately. You can't just add them together and advertise that number.

[Morgan MLGman]

 but I do feel like you're a bit too generous with AMD.

I can say the same from what I've read, about you and Intel

[TheElt]

Yeah, let's disregard the fact the athlon 64 was a completely different architecture. Take a gpu, do you think if you did a single threaded benchmark and a multithreaded one on a gpu you'd see close to perfect scaling? And yet nobody is disputing the use of the name cuda core.

 

Or, take an arm chip with the big.LITTLE archuitecture. Is anyone arguing that it doesn't contain 8 cores? no. Does it provide 8x single core performance when you do multithreaded? hell no. Because it's a completely different concept. That doesn't mean it contains less cores than advertised. Of course marketing will try to make it seem better than it is, but that doesn't mean they're lieing.

If a CPU has 4 cores, then if you keep the turbo levels the same you should see near perfect scaling between workloads, even within the architecture. If AMD's CPU was an 8 core, and you kept the turbo levels the same for single core and full load, then there should still be near 8x scaling, but there isn't.

 

Alright, lets look at an ARM chip. The Exynos chips from Samsung is the biggest outlier with scaling, in Geekbench going from 1 core to full load gives a boost of 3.34x. When you look at the spec list it is a 4+4 chip, and the full load turbo is only 1.5GHz vs 2.1GHz in single threaded workloads. You look at other chips, and it gets better. Take the Denver core Tegra K1, single threaded it scores 1885, multi threaded it scores 3205, scaling 1.7x (Only specs I can find is up to 2.5GHz, not sure about single core and multi core turbo speeds). Or how about the Snapdragon 801? 2.97x scaling, however the 801 will turbo a single core to 2.5GHz, and all 4 cores will only go to 2.1GHz.

 

Those are mobile chips, lower power envelope than desktop ones and passive cooling. If you leveled out their turbo speeds I bet you would see better scaling than demonstrated there, and regardless of their architecture they all see about the same scaling as eachother, moreso if you account for turbo frequencies.

[juretrn]

Well it wasn't needed by everyone back then.

I know, I just wanted to say that the FPU is not part of the CPU by definition. 

[Morgan MLGman]

Bulldozer has 4 cores or modules, with 2 ALU instead of 1-that's the way it is

Hawwell has 4 cores-that's the way it is

Following the logic you're using, modules ≠ cores, and they have 4 modules with 2 ALU each, therefore they've got no 'cores', so @Sauron has a point imo

The exact definition of a core is not really specified that accurately imo, AMD is going to win this lawsuit cause they can just say their cores are different

I enjoy reading this thread though, it's simply a good discussion with several, different point of views and is educating to some people for sure ^^

[Majestic]

I can say the same from what I've read, about you and Intel

 

That's you just projecting. I think i've been very fair in this topic in my intentions. Your unquestioned faith in AMD, so far as to put them on part with i5's sometimes, does not speak in favor of your accusations towards me. Everytime some topic about AMD vs. Intel props up, you start advocating for FX CPU's with synthetic benchmarks and other red herrings when all that is concerned is gaming. Yes, you'll get shit from me everytime. That has nothing to do with brand loyalty. 

 

I'm saying that advertising them as 8 cores, whilst they're def. not in the general sense (eventhough it's hard to actually establish the defintion on this) is not really something you want to let slide. And the fact that AMD gets away with these things, whilst other (financially healthy) companies get shit for every lack of transparency, is what's bothering me. The double-standard aspect.

 

Not saying the particular way of going at it, the lawsuit, is what i'd recommend. I think it's both futile, as the definition of the lawsuits is lacking, and only gives AMD another opertunity to play the victim card. And 9/10 people side with the victim, giving them free karma points for essentially lying. Or if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least being disingenuous about their advertising.

[Tomsen]

In the general sense, they definitely closer to 8 cores than 4 cores.

[Morgan MLGman]

That's you just projecting. I think i've been very fair in this topic in my intentions. Your unquestioned faith in AMD, so far as to put them on part with i5's sometimes, does not speak in favor of your accusations towards me. Everytime some topic about AMD vs. Intel props up, you start advocating for FX CPU's with synthetic benchmarks and other red herrings when all that is concerned is gaming. Yes, you'll get shit from me everytime. That has nothing to do with brand loyalty. 

 

I'm saying that advertising them as 8 cores, whilst they're def. not in the general sense (eventhough it's hard to actually establish the defintion on this) is not really something you want to let slide. And the fact that AMD gets away with these things, whilst other (financially healthy) companies get shit for every lack of transparency, is what's bothering me. The double-standard aspect.

 

Not saying the particular way of going at it, the lawsuit, is what i'd recommend. I think it's both futile, as the definition of the lawsuits is lacking, and only gives AMD another opertunity to play the victim card. And 9/10 people side with the victim, giving them free karma points for essentially lying. Or if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least being disingenuous about their advertising.

I don't post 'synthetic benchmarks', since I know they don't mean much, all I always say in the FX CPUs case is that they're better than their Intel counterparts within their pricepoints in certain situations, which is true, and for some people and cases they're a better choice, while generally Intel has no real competition on the market. FX series are not as bad as you people make them, that's my main point of all this. Cause there are people that say "Intel is better" unconditionally, and that is generally true as for right now, but not always.

Advertising them as 8 cores might not be precisely true due to a common misconception of what a core is, cause most people associate the definition of a core with modern, Intel ones. It's not also precisely true that their description is false. To settle this once and for all you'd have to get a unified, precise definition of a CPU core, and there is none ;-;

[Misanthrope]

You think anybody would be suing if the bulldozer was on par with Ivy Bridge 4 cores hyperthreaded when it comes to performance? The thing is that you can't very well sue because they "lied" about how fast it was because they just say silly but carefully chosen jargon like "The fastest processor in it's class" meaning it's class can be whatever the fuck they want and such.

[TheProfosist]

He's not goona win that me thinks. So if you have properly multithreading software the architecture works quite smashingly.

[Majestic]

I don't post 'synthetic benchmarks', since I know they don't mean much, all I always say in the FX CPUs case is that they're better than their Intel counterparts within their pricepoints in certain situations, which is true, and for some people and cases they're a better choice, while generally Intel has no real competition on the market. FX series are not as bad as you people make them, that's my main point of all this. Cause there are people that say "Intel is better" unconditionally, and that is generally true as for right now, but not always.

Advertising them as 8 cores might not be precisely true due to a common misconception of what a core is, cause most people associate the definition of a core with modern, Intel ones. It's not also precisely true that their description is false. To settle this once and for all you'd have to get a unified, precise definition of a CPU core, and there is none ;-;

 

Which is not true, hence you get shit for it...everytime. But i'm not going to discuss that here.

 

I think people trying to justify their purchase are trying to cause doubt where there shouldn't be one. When you have two cores, it should be roughly twice as fast as one (given a perfectly multithreaded enviroment). That's how any lay-person will look at it. Anything other than (or close to) twice the performance will be disingenuous by nature.

 

For intel this is, indeed, mostly the case. For AMD this hasn't been the case for their FX series when it has been the case for previous generations. Their 8cores are not 8cores, in any way of interpreting it. And the fact only this line deviates from the "general" sense of multicore tells a tale in itself.

[zMeul]

As long as the specs are clearly listed for those who care enough, I see no fraud attempt or misrepresentation.

well, this is the thing - AMD lists the FX815, for example, as a 8 core CPU; and technically it's a 4 physical cores with 8 logical threads

in this point, AMD misrepresented the product

 

sauce: http://products.amd.com/en-us/search/CPU/AMD-FX-Series/AMD-FX-8-Core-Black-Edition/FX-8150/120

[Majestic]

well, this is the thing - AMD lists the FX815, for example, as a 8 core CPU; and technically it's a 4 physical cores with 8 logical threads

in this point, AMD misrepresented the product

 

sauce: http://products.amd.com/en-us/search/CPU/AMD-FX-Series/AMD-FX-8-Core-Black-Edition/FX-8150/120

 

Exactly, the product page should say 4M/8T. Problem solved. Intel doesn't call their i3's quadcores either. 

 

(yes HT isn't quite the same as AMD's bulldozer, it's the principle here).

[zMeul]

1 flexFPU that acts as 2 independent 128bit units if both pipelines are processing an instruction. downside is 256bit AVX operations need to then take 2 passes of the pipeline... which is long so its nice and sloow.

 

2 pipelines, 2 alus, 2 fpus

 

1 frontend (scheduler).

correct me if I'm wrong, but that scheduler "issues" jobs in order, not in parallel and/or out of order!??!

[TheProfosist]

I can't believe we're still arguing years after this stuff has been throughly researched and essentially settled.

[Morgan MLGman]

Which is not true, hence you get shit for ...everytime. But i'm not going to discuss that here.

 

I think people trying to justify their purchase are trying to cause doubt where there shouldn't be one. When you have two cores, it should be roughly twice as fast as one (given a perfectly multithreaded enviroment). That's how any lay-person will look at it. Anything other than (or close to) twice the performance will be disingenuous by nature.

 

For intel this is, indeed, mostly the case. For AMD this hasn't been the case for their FX series when it has been the case for previous generations. Their 8cores are not 8cores, in any way of interpreting it. And the fact only this line deviates from the "general" sense of multicore tells a tale in itself.

What is not true? Did not get to which statement you refer to

AMD cores can be called 'cores' if you say that the 'cores' they designed were supposed look like that. There is no strict definition of what a CPU core is, there are no strict requirements that have to be met for a core to be called a core, it's up to the designers of the architecture, and they know more than you do, I believe. They knew what they were doing, they cannot lie about stuff cause shit like Nvidia got for 970's happens.

I agree with one thing you said though, their website should say that they're 4M/8C imo. Even if they didn't hide it and they told the public how their architecture of their 'cores' is designed, they should put it there for people that did not know how they differ from Intel cores.

[Sauron]

well, this is the thing - AMD lists the FX8150, for example, as a 8 core CPU; and technically it's a 4 physical cores with 8 logical threads

in this point, AMD misrepresented the product

 

sauce: http://products.amd.com/en-us/search/CPU/AMD-FX-Series/AMD-FX-8-Core-Black-Edition/FX-8150/120

 

No, because unlike intel there are 8 computing units. It's not like there are 4 standard cores and small add-ons that take care of the extra threads.

 

If a CPU has 4 cores, then if you keep the turbo levels the same you should see near perfect scaling between workloads, even within the architecture. If AMD's CPU was an 8 core, and you kept the turbo levels the same for single core and full load, then there should still be near 8x scaling, but there isn't.

 

Alright, lets look at an ARM chip. The Exynos chips from Samsung is the biggest outlier with scaling, in Geekbench going from 1 core to full load gives a boost of 3.34x. When you look at the spec list it is a 4+4 chip, and the full load turbo is only 1.5GHz vs 2.1GHz in single threaded workloads. You look at other chips, and it gets better. Take the Denver core Tegra K1, single threaded it scores 1885, multi threaded it scores 3205, scaling 1.7x (Only specs I can find is up to 2.5GHz, not sure about single core and multi core turbo speeds). Or how about the Snapdragon 801? 2.97x scaling, however the 801 will turbo a single core to 2.5GHz, and all 4 cores will only go to 2.1GHz.

 

Those are mobile chips, lower power envelope than desktop ones and passive cooling. If you leveled out their turbo speeds I bet you would see better scaling than demonstrated there, and regardless of their architecture they all see about the same scaling as eachother, moreso if you account for turbo frequencies.

 

the point with 4+4 cpus is that they still have 8 cores, but in a benchmark you'll only see half of them in action. That does not mean they don't have 8 cores.

 

Phone SoC produces are not pulling the same shit (Except Motorola with the X8).

There is a difference between saying your GPU is a quad core (which it might very well be), and counting all the cores together and only advertising that.

 

What AMD is doing (was doing?) with their APUs is exactly as if Intel had advertised the i5-2500K as a 16-core chip. That's bullshit and only there to trick consumers. You should list the CPU cores and GPU cores separately. You can't just add them together and advertise that number.

 

I agree it's bullshit - but not only is this lawsuit about the fx chips, which don't even have a igpu, if you go and check the diagram amd clearly states exactly what you'll get from an APU. The marketing buzzwords are nonsense, but not straight up lies and the correct information is still available. It's worse when you go to a store and you see desktops with only "12 core cpu" listed in the spec sheet, with no mention of what model it actually is. I don't think it's a nice thing, but I also don't think there are the basics for a lawsuit.

 

Exactly, the product page should say 4M/8T. Problem solved.

 

I agree, doesn't mean they should get sued.

 

Bulldozer has 4 cores or modules, with 2 ALU instead of 1-that's the way it is

Hawwell has 4 cores-that's the way it is

 

So you can't say an ALU is a core, but you can say a module is a core? Who says? It's an arbitrary distinction. Since bulldozer is unlike pretty much anything else they should get at least the benefit of the doubt when they try to explain how it's made in 2 words, since you can see exactly how it's made with just a little research - they hid none of the exact specs.

[Majestic]

AMD cores can be called 'cores' if you say that the 'cores' they designed were supposed look like that. There is no strict definition of what a CPU core is, there are no strict requirements that have to be met for a core to be called a core, it's up to the designers of the architecture, and they know more than you do, I believe. 

 

There is. That of a processor, times the amount advertised. Anything other than that will just be misleading to 99% of the userbase that has no further knowledge of things.

 

You don't just get to make up your own definition if it suits you. 

 

 

I agree, doesn't mean they should get sued.

 

Already said I didn't agree with that

[zMeul]

...

yes and no

 

you do have to take into account the perception of what the user sees, and the OS (being it Linux or Windows) will show this CPU as 4 physical 8 logical

[Sauron]

yes and no

 

you do have to take into account the perception of what the user sees, and the OS (being it Linux or Windows) will show this CPU as 4 physical 8 logical

 

What software shows is pretty irrelevant don't you think? That's just the way the system manager's programmers chose to have the program say in that situation.