AMD hit with deceptive marketing lawsuit over Bulldozer chip core claims

Chip-maker AMD faces a lawsuit for misleading adverts for its Bulldozer processors. The legal action has been started by Tony Dickey at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division; the allegation is that the Bulldozer CPU is advertised as having 8 cores, but it effectively has just 4.

The architecture of the chip is such that each of the cores is unable to operate independently meaning that it functions in the same way as a 4-core processor. AMD faces allegations under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, California’s Unfair Competition Law, as well as false advertising, fraud, breach of express warrant, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.

The lawsuit says that AMD's Bulldozer processors have been built by combining pairs of cores into single modules. This halves the effective number of cores and means the processor is unable to execute as many operations simultaneously as you would expect.

Dickey alleges that thousands of consumers were tricked into buying hardware with lower specifications than advertised.

AMD has yet to comment on the lawsuit, but the company could face large fines if the case does not go its way.