alt Hacker News> Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each...
Yeah that's hyper-threading intel was doing it as well and all modern CPUs do it as well. Where AMD dropped the ball, was they did not disclose that in their marketing as clearly as they should.
All CPUs today are marketed as x cores 2x threads, back then some AMD marketing genius in their infinite wisdom put 8 cores on the box, instead of the honest 4 cores with hyperthreading.
No, AMD's FX "fake" 8-core was more than just 4-cores + hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared. So the FX design would be an in-between a 4-core + SMT and a true 8-core.