Re: /proc/cpuinfo Never Lies (or does it?)
"A core on a multi-core processor has always been understood to provide an independent processing unit, including an independent floating point unit and independent caches"
Sorry but no. "core" at minimum would refer to a CPU and L1 cache (may not be present). A CPU is an ALU plus clock generators, instruction decoding logic and other glue logic plus some registers, amybe even just one. A CPU has been defined since the days of the very first computers that were constructed from valves but I'm going to only consider going as far back as the transistor based microprocessor, the Intel 4004.
Nothing has changed that definition since then. The Intel 4004 is a CPU as any other and thus a single core. Put 4 of them in one chip and you have a 4 core chip.
What I'm saying is the term "core" is not a defined term and is very flexible. Its definition thus would vary between manufactuers who would provide their "cores". If these cors were "modules" that shared an FPU between to Integer CPU's then that is the core. A core with an CPU+FPU+L1 cache is just a different kind of core and a 8 core offering would thus have 8 of THOSE TYPES of core.
Thus I argue that the definition of a core is a set of CPU's supplied in a single chip package. These are CPU's I'm talking about. They only do integer math at a minimum and dont have L1 cache. All a CPU need is an ALU, some registers and logic to fetch and decode instructions (opcodes) and data (operands) from external memory. Learning a bit of machine code is very enlightening.
So if I give you a chip with 4 6502 CPU's on it and a bit of logic to manage them all, thats a 4 core chip. If I give you one with 4x pentium cpus each with their own L1 cache and a shared FPU, thats a 4 core chip. If I give you a new design of that chip that adds 3 more FPU's dedicated to each pentium CPU thats a 4 core chip that has the potential to beat the previous offering.
Thus this AMD chip was an 8 core chip. It had 8x what AMD offered as cores. An 8 core intel chip would have been of a different design and as we know a better one.
The term core is not defined. It is marketing speak at best. This lawsuit is just nitpicking by people who dont know the terminology. If anything comes out of this it may be a formal definition of what a core is, as defined by non-technical people.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
