AMD settles case over ‘deception’ with number of cores FX Bulldozer processors

AMD has a so-called class-action case about advertising an incorrect core number with its FX Bulldozer processors suitable for $12.1 million. Customers felt misled with the claim that they were octacores.

The settlement agreement concerns purchasers of seven types of FX Bulldozer processors: FX-8120, FX-8150, FX-8320, FX-8350, FX-8370, FX-9370 and FX-9590. It only concerns people who bought the chips and lived in California or who made the purchase after visiting AMD.com. They are eligible for a portion of the settlement amount of 12.1 million.

The settlement agreement, published by The Register, states that if 20 percent of eligible individuals file a claim, they are likely to receive more than $35 per chip purchased. The agreement states that nothing has yet been discussed about paying the legal costs, but that the lawyers unilaterally propose that their costs do not exceed thirty percent of the amount of $12.1 million. In that case, $8.87 million would remain for the injured customers.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in 2015 and concerns AMD’s marketing of FX Bulldozer processors as “the first desktop processors with eight native cores.” In practice, the processors had four modules, each with two execution cores, which shared L2 cache, branch predictor, instruction fetch and the floating point unit, among other things. Customers who joined the class-action case felt misled because the cores couldn’t function independently of each other, so there weren’t really any octa-cores.

Early this year, the judge dismissed AMD’s claim that “a majority” of people interpret the term “core” the way the company did. What consumers actually regarded as core would be fundamental to the course of the case, according to the judge. The judge has yet to approve the current settlement agreement.