AMD is in for quite a kerfuffle when it allegedly made a marketing blunder, and the chip maker is now facing a class-action lawsuit for its inaccurate advertisement. It's marketing 101 to exaggerate a product to attract customers, but it's a completely different matter when a manufacturer doesn't disclose the important details of its merchandise to generate sales.

AMD reportedly misled customers into thinking that its line of Bulldozer processors function with eight cores, but only four cores were in fact working. Essentially, the suit claims that each core in the AMD processor can't operate individually, making two cores technically count as only one fully fledged core.

"AMD built the Bulldozer processors by stripping away components from two cores and combining what was left to make a single 'module.' But by removing certain components of two cores to make one module, they no longer work independently. As a result, AMD's Bulldozers suffer from material performance degradation and cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently as claimed" the filed class-action lawsuit against AMD reads (PDF).

This "design" wasn't disclosed to the public, which is one of the reasons why AMD is in this mess. As everyone can imagine, this resulted in an underpowered chipset, and it is to the disappointment of many gamers and performance enthusiasts everywhere.

However, if the court defines the meaning of a core and how each one is counted, it could prove to be troublesome. Although it was wrong for AMD to not divulge the aforementioned design of the Bulldozer processors, allowing the court to gain full control over the subject can potentially make matters worse, as chipsets are built with distinct architectures. In other words, if a processor's cores are determined based on its performance, then the number of cores in the future will be counted depending on a chipset's relative performance compared with others.

Take AMD's Bulldozer for instance. It was built with eight cores, but it was classified with having only four cores because of its similar performance to an Intel quad-core chip.

AMD has not commented about the issue yet, and as of right now, it's unclear how this lawsuit will turn out. In the event that the chip maker loses the case, it's believed that the charges will be at least $5 million.

Photo: Nayu Kim | Flickr