AMD has reportedly agreed to pay $12.1 million to to settle Bulldozer chips false advertising class action suit in a class action lawsuit. Ending a years-long dispute that claimed AMD falsely advertised the chips as eight-core processors when they in fact only possessed half that number, via The Register.
According to the lawsuit, the Bulldozer-based chips weren’t truly multicore processors to the extent that AMD claimed. AMD advertised the CPUs as eight-core chips, but each chip only had four dual-core modules with separate execution units other resources like cache and a single floating point unit (FPU) were shared across the module.
AMD says that those modules counted as two cores each, for a total of eight, but customers alleged that since the modules couldn’t actually run separate processes, they only should count as a single core for a total of four cores, not the eight that AMD claimed.
Under the settlement, AMD will pay out $12.1 million to a settlement fund, which according to AnandTech out to cover the attorney fees (roughly $3.63 million), settlement administration (between $350,000 and $700,000), leaving roughly $8.12 to $7.77 million to split between the eligible customers.
It’s unclear how much customers will actually get — the settlement notes that the court expects roughly one-fifth of the class members to actually apply for the payout, but that if more people do apply, they should still receive about $35 per chip. But until the final settlement is approved and class members actually start applying it’s hard to say anything about it.
