The Dutch website Hardware.info found that a HP Pavilion 17 laptop was advertized with a quad-core CPU while in reality it contained a dual-core CPU. The AMD A8-7050 CPU was mentioned on websites of many online retailers and in print advertisements as a quad-core CPU. An user who bought the laptop tipped Hardware.info and they found the chip has only two cores enabled and therefore is a dual-core CPU instead of quad-core.
The laptop was sold by many large online and offline retailers in the Netherlands and Belgium with model numbers HP 17-p030nd and 17-p031nd. The tipster noticed two CPU graphs in the Task Manager instead of the expected four of a quad-core processor. When he contacted the HP customer service, they assured him he received a quad-core CPU. Tests of Hardware.info proved that wrong.
AMD doesn't even list the AMD A8-7050 and the CPU appears not to be used by another PC manufacturer than HP. It's possible the chip is produced specially for HP. The confusion also isn't strange, all A8 CPUs are quad-cores, except for the one in the specific HP Pavilion laptops.
HP lists the CPU as a quad-core running at 1.8Ghz with a 2MB cache. Some HP pages also list the CPU as running between 2.2 and 3 Ghz and tests of Hardware.info showed that it indeed is able to run at a maximum clockspeed of 3Ghz. Nevertheless, the CPU has two cores instead of four which has a dramatic effect on its performance.
Based on the listed specifications the performance of the chip should be similar to that of the AMD A8-7410, a quad-core CPU with a maximum clock speed of 2.5Ghz. When tested however, the chip performed 55% worse on a multithreaded Cinebench R15 test.
Obviously very bad news for buyers of the laptops with this CPU onboard. Meanwhile Hardware.info informed HP who apologized for the false advertising of the CPU and retailers have stated to try to find an appropiate solution for those who bought laptops with the falsely advertised CPU.
The entire story underlines that you should properly test computers you purchase to see if you've got what you paid for. Unfortunately less tech savvy users will probably never notice such a mistake.
The lesson we've learned from all this is, that if you're in the market for a new computer you should double check if you really got what was advertised.
