AMD is being sued for damages in civil court over the number of cores found on Bulldozer 8-core CPUs. A gentleman named Tony Dickey filed a class-action lawsuit on Oct. 26th, 2015 in San Jose against AMD claiming that the company used deceptive marketing and is seeking damages. The suit alleges AMD built the Bulldozer processors 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. You can see the AMD Bulldozer die shot below from our AMD FX-8150 processor review back in 20011.
As a result, Dickey argues that AMD’s Bulldozer CPUs suffer from material performance degradation, and cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently as claimed. He alleges that average consumers in the market for computer CPUs lack the requisite technical expertise to understand the design of AMD’s processors and trust the company to convey accurate specifications regarding its CPUs. Because AMD did not convey accurate specifications, Dickey argues that tens of thousands of consumers over the years have been misled into buying Bulldozer CPUs that cannot perform the way a true eight-core CPU would. It will be interesting to see how this case turns out!
If you’d like to follow the case you can on this site and here is the case information: U.S. District Court For the Northern District of California, San Jose Division Case number 5:15-cv-04922-PSG.
