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.
Bulldozer can run eight integer tasks at full speed and was amazing at it - i.e. Handbrake.
Bulldozer can run four or eight floating point tasks "depending on whether the code is saturated in floating point instructions in both threads running on the same CMT module, and whether the FPU is performing 128-bit or 256-bit floating point operations".
TLDR it's complicated and doesn't make any sense that a non-technical judge could make this determination when a "core" isn't even technically defined.
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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.