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AMD Chip Fraud Delays Release of New Chipset
rocketman768 writes "According to internetnews.com a workshop in Taipei has been re-labeling nearly a million AMD Athlon XPs. It seems AMD is spending more time investigating this than on releasing their new Alchemy chipset which boasts direct transfer of video from digital video recorders to portable players without the need to transcode through a PC."
Erm...
When a chip is labelled, it is usually a cheaper slower chip remarked as a faster chip.
Now, when this chip is sold and fails/fizzles/burns up, its AMD's reputation on the line.
This has no parallels with copyrights and the like. AMD is doing what it must to protect its name and its profits (doh!)
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How did AMD not notice this before a million chips were relabeled?
This just shows that AMD has reached a point Intel was at 5 or 6 years ago. I worked for a hardware reseller, that got burned by a lot of hotwired, Pentium II's. It was so bad that we were raided by the FEDs'. That freaked me out. Try coming to work one day, walk into the Shop and Agent Smith, flips a Badge and ask you to step into the Boss's Office, for an Interview.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
So is there any way to tell, as a user?
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The reason AMD are so well renowned amongst geeks is _because_ they are over clockable, are they willing to risk this? It's one of their selling points surely.
I think the author is a bit of a fraud himself for sensationalizing this. He calls them "counterfeit" and "fake" but that's not really what they are.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like these guys just bought a bunch of AMD chips, marked higher clock speeds on them, and then resold them.
Yeah it's a million chips but this is not big-time counterfeiting. It's not like they ripped off the design files and built it in their own fab, which would take TREMENDOUS resources, and is a project of such a scale that it would be impossible to do in secret.
When the SO and I went to Cuba a few years ago, the alarm clock was branded "Panashiba"! No, for real!
-chargen
Taiwan has been remarking CPUs for at least 10 years. I remember back in the days of the 486 chips with multipliers... most of the chips available were remarked chips, and all anyone cared about was: (1) "can I actually run it at that frequency?" and (2) how much?
Has anything changed?
Just downloaded the Au1200 databook and had a look at the media accelerator chapter. The Media Acceleration Engine (MAE) is a hardware accelerator that provides IDCT and Motion Compensation similar to that of the ATI Rage 128 / Radeon series. There is full documentation on the internal operation of the MAE together with listings of all the registers. This means that it won't be long before it'll be supported under Linux.
Contrast this with ATI who refuse to release documentation on the IDCT unit. And even worse - Broadcom who make competing CPUs won't release ANY databook unless under NDA.
Is there some kind of guide comparing mislabeled AMD processors to the real deal?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
During the HardOCP presentation, a pretty significant guy from AMD discussed this matter. He said AMD is not against hobbyists overclocking their chips. He said they're upset over an 'asian company' buffing off their labelling, overclocking the chips, and relabelling the chips. I had just bought an Athlon XP 3200 "OEM" chip and was curious if it might be one of the bootlegged CPUs. I talked to an engineer at their booth and showed him the chip. AMD, like several other QuakeCon sponsors, had real-deal engineers on hand to address technical queries. Not just booth babes handing out shirts. The guy I talked to said he had never seen a 3200 made with a green PCB. He also gave me the contact info for an FBI agent who is investigating this phenomena. Later on, I asked a friend of mine who works at AMD about the green-vs-gold PCB issue. His co-workers were likewise skeptical of a 3200 mounted on a green PCB. So now I'm going to contact that FBI agent and see what he thinks.
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A Sempron is an Athlon 64/Opteron with the 64-bit goodness disabled, so you get most of the performance benefits of the new architecture, except the 64-bitness and extra registers, on a package that fits into a Socket A, AFAIK. Some Semprons fit in Socket 754, perhaps to appeal to the silly people out there who are either scared of proper 64-bit processors (because intel hasn't done it properly yet) or who go around saying, "you don't need 64 bits for anything."
Stick Men
For instance, News.com posted this in an article way back in May of 2003: "The move comes amid the discovery of a remarked chip market earlier this year. In February, AMD embarked of a series of raids in the Philippines."
AMD combats chip fraud in Asia
Words to men, as air to birds.