AMD has agreed to a $12.1 million settlement in a class action lawsuit for some customers who bought its FX-8000 / 9000 CPUs built on its 2011 Bulldozer architecture, 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…