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AMD Chip Fraud Delays Release of New Chipset

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-cricket dept.

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."

18 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. AMD by bharatk · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:AMD by mollusk · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      The Revolution. Now available as a convienent six tape series from PBS.
    2. Re:AMD by FRiC · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. what's the big deal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. Yea by kaiser423 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Is this by Gentlewhisper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  5. I need some magic glasses too by Magickcat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I need some magic glasses too by rlsnyder · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:I need some magic glasses too by Ed+Thomson · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  6. Excuse me? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Bad for overclockers by grahamsz · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Bad for overclockers by the_mad_poster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
  8. cat /proc/cpuinfo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:cat /proc/cpuinfo by canadiangoose · · Score: 5, Informative
      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
      --
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  9. Alchemy by kinema · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
  10. Author didn't understand story, made up headline by Somegeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    --
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  11. How is this anything New? by CygnusXII · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  12. Its the latest thing. Soon evryne will be doing it by Pizaz · · Score: 5, Funny

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