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

AMD

[bharatk]

I guess noone noticed their chips were manafactured by "Advanced Moocro Devices".

Re:AMD

[mollusk]

Hey, I know a genuine 'Panaphonics' when I see one.

Re:AMD

[FRiC]

The article refers to xbitlabs which refers to Sin Chew Daily, which isn't even a Taiwanese newspaper. I searched Taiwanese sites and the most recent AMD related bust only found 60,000 pcs of remarked chips, not a million as reported.

Re:AMD

[plover]

You're not thinking like a big-time ripoff artist (which is not a bad thing!)

They could have structured their purchases using legitimate motherboard companies as intermediaries, or they could have set up their own front company to hide the purchase. Just because you've never heard of Panashiba doesn't mean AMD's sales rep won't sell to them.

Possibly they used a Chinese or Russian firm as a cutout. Both of those countries are large enough that a million chips not hitting the market might go unnoticed. The order could also have come through a corrupt government official from a smaller country, such as Cuba, under the pretext of a military or governmental order.

They could even have hijacked a freighter or cargo containers carrying product. Computer chips long ago replaced lipstick as the highest dollar value per truck for hijacking. They have a tremendous resale value.

We may never know, but it sure would be interesting to find out.

what's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

they're just doing the overclocking for you! saves the customer time, really.

Yea

[kaiser423]

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.

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!)

I need some magic glasses too

[Magickcat]

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?

Re:I need some magic glasses too

[rlsnyder]

I second that thought. Does the submittor really think AMD takes their engineers and sends them out in the field to do legal and investigative work?

I *think* AMD has more than one department.

Is editorializing necessary on every darn news story?

Re:I need some magic glasses too

[Ed Thomson]

AMD have a "jack of all trades" type workforce. Instead of everyone working on different projects and getting lots of things done slowly, they all work on the same thing at the same time to get a few things accomplished really fast.

So yes the whole company stopped working on releasing the new chipset and are now all working on the investigating the re-labeling.

Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bad for overclockers

[grahamsz]

Now AMD will be forced to investigate new ways of preventing chips being overclocked to stop this from happening again.

Re:Bad for overclockers

[the_mad_poster]

Doubtful. With the cost of fabs, it would probably be less expensive just to raid and shut down the illegal "producers" than to try and work out elaborate protection schemes.

Remember - implementing half-assed software hacks to "protect" content on a CD is relatively cheap compared to the cost of imlpementing something similar to prevent overclocking in a complex computer chip.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:cat /proc/cpuinfo

[0racle]

...you would think even a not-so-clever user would start to notice...
I would doubt it. To most people the bios output is just a bunch of text, as long as there is text and it doesn't stop, the system is working. Most people don't look at what it says.

Re:cat /proc/cpuinfo

[canadiangoose]

My chip is an Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) overclocked to 2.2GHz on a 200MHz bus, and this is what shows up on my system:

Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root=302 apic_tack=1 devfs=mount
Initializing CPU#0
PID hash table entries: 2048 (order 11: 16384 bytes)
Detected 2204.860 MHz processor.
......
......
Calibrating delay loop... 4358.14 BogoMIPS
......
......
CPU: After generic identify, caps: 0383fbff c1c3fbff 00000000 00000000
CPU: After vendor identify, caps: 0383fbff c1c3fbff 00000000 00000000
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)
CPU: After all inits, caps: 0383fbff c1c3fbff 00000000 00000020
Intel machine check architecture supported.
Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3200+ stepping 00

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.

Somebody please read the f___ing article

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Author didn't understand story, made up headline

[Somegeek]

"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.

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.

Mismarked chips?

[bob beta]

You mean the numbers on those chips don't designate their clock speed?!?

Its the latest thing. Soon evryne will be doing it

[Pizaz]

AMD has even filed a patent for it. They are calling it Enterprise Level Preemptive Multitasking.

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.