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Ever buy an AMD FX eight-core CPU in California? You may be owed up to $300

Ever buy an AMD FX eight-core CPU in California? You may be owed up to $300

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Or if you bought one from AMD.com

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Live in California? Or, perhaps, do you buy computer processors directly from AMD.com? Did you ever pay for an AMD FX-8120, 8150, 8320, 8350, 8370, 9370, or 9590 processor?

If so, you can now submit a claim for up to $300 per CPU.

That’s because in August, AMD agreed to pay a $12.1 million class action settlement to nix a question that had been dodging it for years: whether it falsely advertised its Bulldozer and Piledriver CPUs as eight-core processors when that was something of a technicality. They did have eight cores, but those cores were spread across four “modules,” each of which only had one set of the resources you’d typical pair with a CPU core back in the day.

Tough luck if you live in other states, it seems

The market already punished AMD for that error when those processors failed to impress at launch. They were arguably a big factor in the decline of the company’s fortunes — though AMD has managed to steadily claw its way back since, partly thanks to winning the next-gen game console war two generations in a row. (Unless you count Nintendo’s Switch with its Nvidia chip.) We’re even seeing AMD chips in a new Surface Laptop now, and laptops have long been AMD’s weakness.

I mention all this because I figure if you’re the kind of person who actually bought one of these CPUs back in 2011, 2012, or 2013, you probably knew a thing or two about AMD and are curious how they’ve been doing since.

But I also imagine you want to know how to get that money, and the answer is: submit this claim form by January 3rd, 2020. You may need to hit the Click Here button on the right to see it. You don’t need to submit proof of purchase — yet — if you bought fewer than five of them.

Just don’t expect to actually get $300 per CPU, or even $300 at all — like we explained with the much, much larger Equifax settlement, the more people who sign up, the less money each person might get. With the lawyers taking up to 30 percent of that $12.1 million, the two plaintiffs getting up to $7,500 each, and up to an estimated $700,000 for settlement administration, some back-of-the-napkin math shows there’d only be room for around 25,000 payments of the full $300.

The court will tally up those claim forms and decide whether the settlement seems fair on February 20th, 2020.