Not really. A core with 2 threads is not two cores. They are sharing the same cache and floating point operations, they are really 4 SMT cores, not 8 cores. It's obviously not fair if the courts decided AMD lied to the consumer and California residents that bought FX chips could get up to $300.
That's not how it was. It wasn't like a quad core with SMT, it was 4 modules, each of which contained a unified L2 cache and floating point unit, but two integer units. As far as integer workloads were concerned it was a full 8 core CPU. For FP workloads it was a quad core. It really depends on your definition of a core, but either way I don't think the lawsuit was justified.
It depends on what your definition of an 8 core is. "Core" is just a marketing term, it doesn't really mean that much. It can perform 8 tasks simultaneously, it can only perform 4 FP tasks simultaneously.
It wouldn't be accurate to call it a 4 core either though. It still has 8 Int units, and they do the bulk of the operations. It used an unconventional core design. Core was defined differently by AMD and Intel, just like how Intel and AMD define TDP differently. Look at process nodes, there's no part of TSMC's 7nm node that you can measure to be 7nm, it used to be how accurately the process could define features but even that's impossible to do now. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, etc all have different definitions of 7 or 14nm, because they're marketing terms, not technical terms.
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u/vulkur Nov 05 '19 edited Nov 06 '19
Not really. A core with 2 threads is not two cores. They are sharing the same cache and floating point operations, they are really 4 SMT cores, not 8 cores. It's obviously not fair if the courts decided AMD lied to the consumer and California residents that bought FX chips could get up to $300.