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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."
I guess noone noticed their chips were manafactured by "Advanced Moocro Devices".
they're just doing the overclocking for you! saves the customer time, really.
That's something they have to be pretty agressive about. They're starting to get a really good name among the PHB's and average joe's. So, they have to really fight to keep their reputation growing. Their new reputation is almost to the point where it's a selling point. They just need to keep it there, and then they have a cash cow.
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!)
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
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."
Funny, I didn't read that or infer that from the article. Perhaps you have special glasses that let you read invisible ink?
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
It seems AMD is spending more time investigating this than on releasing their new Alchemy chipset
Yes, I'm sure they've taken their fab plant workers and assigned them to detective jobs instead.
Now AMD will be forced to investigate new ways of preventing chips being overclocked to stop this from happening again.
Wouldn't the BIOS detect this and display it right when a system boots up, you would think even a not-so-clever user would start to notice that the numbers on the package and the numbers on the screen don't match up
A simple cat /proc/cpuinfo on a GNU/Linux system for experienced users should expose the farce too, correct me if I'm wrong.
Submitter? Editor? Anyone read this? It said "shadowed" and "put a damper on." There is no assertion anywhere that the fraud caused a chipset delay.
How did AMD not notice this before a million chips were relabeled?
"The news has put a damper on the release of Alchemy, the company's new processor.".
The author evidently thought this quote meant that AMD was slowing down the release of the processor, instead of realizing that it just means that it dulled some of AMD's excitement over the new product release. The story even states that AMD is already selling "large quantities" of the chipset. Sounds like they are releasing it just fine, no delays.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
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!
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.
You mean the numbers on those chips don't designate their clock speed?!?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
AMD has even filed a patent for it. They are calling it Enterprise Level Preemptive Multitasking.
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?
Actually, it was very weird.I pulled into the parking lot, and cars where everywhere. I had been trying to tell my employers we were in for a shit storm, for a month. We (all the RMA Techs) kept tally sheets, specifically for RMA Complaints concerning those CPU's. We had taken one of them apart, to see what was going on under the hood, and they were Hotwired. Here's a quote from an Online Story, that we were involved in.
"Even armed with knowledge of the re-marking problem, Brock again went shopping online for a CPU upgrade for another system. Thinking he was protected by the "clock locking" technology in the new generation of Pentium IIs, Brock ordered a PII-400 from Micro Source. "When I first got it, the [CPU's] case didn't fit properly, and I thought it didn't look right," says Brock. His research pointed him to Intel's CPUID utility (see " ID, Please" ) and another tool from a German computer magazine, both of which indicated that his chip might be overclocked. He e-mailed Intel for confirmation, but no one there could tell him for sure. After finding evidence of tampering inside the CPU's case, Brock realized he had another re-marked CPU. Fortunately, he was able to return it and get a refund. Micro Source President Eugene Braverman says, "We did have one or two instances where consumers ended up with CPUs we were suspicious about. Now we only buy from Intel-authorized dealers." http://tinyurl.com/6uqe5/ [PCWorld.com] When the Feds' came they confiscated so much stuff, it was amazing. We had a lot of Customers Machines, that were built to order, they all were... Just Gone,we never saw them again, forged CPUs' or Not.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
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.
AMD has announced the Alchemy Au1200 for Personal Media Players on 3 JAN, including price and date for availability... This CPU provides a DVD-quality display that can be scaled directly to larger screens. The Au1200 processor is designed to support industry-standard media formats, including MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9, H.263 and DivX.
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?
Oh yeah! Clearly AMD's engineers are tied up doing this investigation...
</sarcasm>
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."
Yes rocketman768, AMD has one guy that designs chipsets and manages their legal department. While his skills are incredible, he has not been managing his time well lately. This has resulted in the Alchemy being delayed. I will forward your message to HR and let them know about your concerns.
Your headline is a display of intellectualism that can only be rivaled by an autistic sea monkey. For that, the Internet thanks you.
DigiTimes reports that "Over a million re-marked AMD CPUs have allegedly been shipped to Germany and China, the Chinese-language Liberty Times reported Saturday, ..."
DigiTimes ~ Taiwan police seize 60,000 suspect AMD CPUs
http://slashdot.org/~2TecTom/journal/94553
Words to men, as air to birds.
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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The stockyard allows the vicious Cattle Processing Unit (CPU) to access the cattle more efficiently than having to fetch each cow individually from the open range when it's needed to be the subject of one vile torture or another.
Oh, wait, that's not a "cash cow"; that's a "cow cache".
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
This article brings to mind an incident I had with an Athlon I'd bought last year for my computer... I bought a 2200+ from a shop in Sydney, Australia, but when I started up the computer the BIOS recognised it as a 1800+, although it displayed it as a 2200+ when I took the computer back to the shop and the shop guy did 'Load Optimised Defaults' in the BIOS. Has anyone else here had similar experiences? ~Aly~
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.
"Well, rocketman768 says they can't do X because they are doing Y."
Are these utilities of any use?a lResou rces/0,,30_182_871_2364,00.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Technic
I guess a serial number you could actually call and check with AMD about would cause the privacy worriers to shit themselves, but it would be useful in this case.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga