Strawberry Fields Forever
There's a number of reasons why the lawsuit is total baloney:
#1: A single core is no single core any more, and has not been for a long time.
You see, AMD, Intel and ARM designs have all the same feature: they are superscalar. This means that one core is divided in many "pipelines", up to 8 in the case of Intel Haswell and AMD Bulldozer. Each of these pipeline is designed for a specific purpose: memory branch, floating point op, integer op etc... In many cases, there is more than one floating point pipeline or integer pipeline. So in theory, one core can do up to 8 ops. per clock. In practice it is more around 2 for different technical reasons. Here is a good read on the subject: http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/
#2: Somebody has to define what would be the performance of a legit 8 core CPU.
AMD K10, which is the architecture prior to Bulldozer, was very competitive for its time (2007-2010). Bulldozer is an evolution from K10, because AMD doesn't just start from scratch at every CPU gen they make. When bulldozer was released, in 2011, it had 90% of the performance of K10, when compared at the same frequency and number of core. K10 was limited to 6 core, but bulldozer can have up to 8 cores (4 modules). And now new gen Bulldozer (piledriver, steamroller, excavator) all perform better than the "real" K10 cores.
Trust me. If you buy a $$$$ 18 cores Intel Xeon and think it's gonna game like hell, good luck with the 2.3 ghz core frequency. But afterwards you can always sew intel... right?
#3 The AMD CPUs work and behave just like real x number of cores (2-4-6-8).
On ANY real world or synthetic benchmark, the bulldozer familly of CPUs behave just like Intel single threaded CPUs. One Bulldozer module performs as well as 2 equivalent discrete cores. If you putt a workload on one AMD core and it takes 8 seconds to complete, it'll take more or less 1 second to complete with all 8 cores active. These CPUs perform just like legitimate 2-4-6-8 core parts.
#4 What is really happening
Right now, if you buy a high end (high end in 2012) AMD FX 8350 8 Cores @ 4.0 GHz, you will pay it 169$ :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=8350&N=-1&isNodeId=1
Now try to find a intel CPU for 169$ that actually doesn't suck. Nope, sorry, nothing there for you.
Unless you want an i3 4340 dual core... which the same price AMD CPU just obliterates.
AMD never diddled anybody with is bulldozer CPUs. These CPUs always delivered more performance per dollar than any intel option anyways. I hope the lawyers there are also partial time microelectronics engineers. This lawsuit is a total joke. Like a guy in his living room buys two AMD FX 9000 and suddenly becomes an expert in computer science. There are billions of transistors on a single chip. You can not just create a definition of what a CPU core is. In 5 years it's gonna be obselete.
Sorry for the mistakes. I'm not a native english speaker!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
