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."

Comments

Re:Is this

[Gentlewhisper]

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!)

Alchemy

[kinema]

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

AMD's Alchemy line isn't a mainboard chipset it is their brand of 32 bit embedded MIPS SoC (system on a chip) devices. The Au1200 is the newest in the family targeted for use in digital media players like PVRs. What makes the Au1200 perfect for media players is it's hardware video codecs that support MPEG1, 2, 4 (including DivX) and WMV9.

How is this anything New?

[CygnusXII]

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.

Seriously....

[tuxter]

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.

Au1200 media accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

this was discussed by AMD @ QuakeCon

[SethJohnson]

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.