AMD Issues Official Statement Regarding Bulldozer Core Count Suit

Overnight we received an official statement from AMD about the class action lawsuit filed against the chip maker alleging the company engaged in fraud and deceptive marketing when it claimed that Bulldozer processors had eight cores.

We believe our marketing accurately reflects the capabilities of the Bulldozer architecture which, when implemented in an 8 core AMD FX processor is capable of running 8 instructions concurrently. – AMD

News about the suit (Dickey v. Advanced Micro Devices Inc) broke last week and it appears that the suit alleges that Bulldozer only truly has four cores instead of eight since the cores share certain resources and can’t run eight instructions simultaneously. Extreme Tech published an in-depth look at how Bulldozer works way back in 2011 and found that the additional cores improved performance and were able to handle more than four instructions simultaneously. It will be interesting to see how this one turns out!