AMD will pay purchasers of its FX Bulldozer processors a total of $12.1m to settle a four-year lawsuit.

Considering the number of processors sold and assuming a 20 per cent take-up by eligible purchasers, that works out to $35 a chip.

The chip giant advertised the specific processors as being the "first native 8-core desktop processor" and charged a premium for it. But soon purchasers found that the chip did not contain eight fully independent, fully featured processing units but rather four Bulldozer modules that each contain a pair of fully fledged instruction-executing CPU cores.

According to AMD, four modules times two CPU cores equals eight CPU cores. But to the consumers, who launched a class action lawsuit back in 2015, they are not real “cores” because they share resources, including frontend circuitry and a single floating point unit (FPU).

Both AMD and the plaintiff’s lawyers argued to the judge that $12.1m is a “fair” amount of compensation, despite the fact that consumers paid an additional $60m in premiums for their “eight core” processors.