AMD in legal difficulties due to “misleading advertising” for its FX CPUs

In 2015, a class action lawsuit was filed against AMD for advertising its Bulldozer/Piledriver processor series, also known as the FX series, which, according to AMD, offered up to “eight cores”, an allegation that the plaintiffs’ claims were false.

AMD’s Bulldozer architecture consists of core modules, each providing two CPU cores in a single module and sharing resources between the individual cores. The complaint alleges that AMD’s Bulldozer-based processors do not actually have eight cores, but offer four cores and eight subprocessors, claiming that sharing resources between bulldozer cores results in performance bottlenecks.

The plaintiffs claim in this case that the bulldozer CPUs functionally have only four cores on the grounds that the processors they purchase are “inferior to the products represented by the defendant (AMD).

 

AMD has refuted these allegations by declaring that “a substantial majority” of people use the same “central” definition as AMD, but U.S. Judge Haywood Gilliam disagrees and allows this class action lawsuit to proceed. The trial is expected to begin later this year. The class will see both sides of this argument meet again in court on February 5 to decide the timing of the case, with AMD planning to “vigorously” defend itself.

The FX processors were considered bugs, as they were far from Intel’s performance with its Core series. AMD relied heavily on parallelism with Bulldozer, but the high one-thread performance of Intel processors eventually won the battle. It seems that this lawsuit could be another continuation of this battle lost several years ago, just as AMD is reborn thanks to the Ryzen series.