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Remarked Celerons Sold As P4s
Lam1969 writes "Sumner Lemon reports that a Chinese company, Shenzhen Chuanghui Electronics Co., is remarking Celeron chips as Pentium 4s and supplying software to mask the chips' real pedigree from operating systems. From the article : 'The remarked processors Chuanghui sells are actually 1.7-GHz Celeron chips and are currently available for $78 each, including a motherboard, in quantities of 100 or more, said James Zhan, a company representative named online as a contact for potential buyers. By comparison, Intel sells the real thing for $401 in 1,000-unit quantities without a motherboard, according to the company's most recent price list.'"
I wonder whether they're supplying users with custom patches to the Linux-kernel as well to cover their processors' real innermost :>
If they actually include a motherboard with a halfway decent chipset, I'd probably buy one of those combos at 70US$ regardless of their fraudulent business practises, though.
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YTARY!
There not hiding it, because they sell to PC builders (per 1000 CPUs). The PC builders will then use the software to defraud their constumers. As if the net profit by using pirated Windows wasn't enough.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
50 years ago Chuanghui Genuine Gold Jewelry Company was stamping "14K" into brass jewelry. The enclosed warranty assured the buyer that "any discoloration of flesh is sometimes maybe."
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A certain british PC vendor whom I won't name, but they're not huge (wink, wink) are notorious for boxes which do not contain their advertised contents. However they get away with it because Mum and Pop don't know how to check and are grateful that they got a 'bargain'.
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True enough, but are the people who end up buying these systems even going to notice the difference.
I used to work with a guy who only used his computer (pentium 200MHz) to surf the net on dial-up; he decided to upgrade and shopped around for the cheapest thing he could find and ended up with a Pentium 4 at 1.5GHz (this was like a year ago) which he choose over a Celeron at 2.5 GHz because a 'Pentium 4 is just way better'; he seems to be extremely happy because 'Webpages couldn't load faster' (remember he's on dial-up). Anyways, the people who are shopping around for the cheapest thing (and are still 'brand-conscience') are the ones that are going to be taken by this type of scam; the truth is they'll be happy because the 'Webpages couldn't load faster' and 'Microsoft Word can spell check at an amazing speed'.
When I arrived at my current job, a lot of machines were AT&T Pentiums, a big lot of them... Last year we ditched the machines so I opened a couple to see if they had something usefull, guess what , I found 486s on ALL of them , never did I lookd at the bios of them neither at any kind of diagnose, so they passes ok, and believe me for 486s thet run quite well. Someone made a HUGE amount of cash with that deal...
It seems that they are doing exactly that, in the hope of getting business from PC makers who want to cheat their customers.
I wonder how long they will get away with this. In most western countries, I think they could be indicted for some form of "aiding and abetting" of criminal activities.
C - the footgun of programming languages
But I suspect more than 60% of Celerons are fully functionnal P4s that were lobotomized to avoid flooding the market with high-end parts that would kill ASPs. If we look at AMD that does market-specific core respins, we know yields are good enough to make area-optimized all-or-nothing cores more desirable than one-size-fits-all lobotomizable designs when production capacity is somewhat limited.
I Have been programming for the past 5 years. I have rarely opened the case up to see what is inside. If I do it is to replace a hard drive or put in a new network card. I spent very little time looking at the CPU and figure out oh that was a celerion vs a P4, or an AMD, when I open the Box I know where the stuff is. But when I open a Box and see a Celeron vs a P4 it would probably pass by me unless I was actually checking for such and then Ill just good the information and see how a Socket 478 Looks different from a LGA775. But as of right now (Because my computer is a Mac and the Office computers that are not laptops max procesors are P3 with mostly P2 (We have faster laptops with a different layout)) I don't the type of processor is which, I did back in the late 90s but after the P2 I really didn't have the time to keep on on processors and I needed to put the effort into keeping up with other technologies, such a Sun hardware. So a person with more then half a clue could still miss it. Because sometimes people are not paying attention to the processor type.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Next, ask them what's the difference between a Socket 478 and an LGA775. How long would it take until someone on the street can answer this?
In fact, I wouldn't be able to answer this question right now, and I'm a programmer/sysadmin who sets up several servers per year. We simply have hardware people, and I get a ready box where my intervention doesn't exceed attaching a disk.
Of course, the last time I built a computer myself, a P2-era Celeron 300A oc/ed to 375, I researched such issues. But nowadays, I simply don't have time to deal with the hardware -- other people are paid to do that. I wouldn't notice the scam in the article unless I happen to glance at the messages during a system boot or notice the discrepancy while resolving some driver problem (non-Windows), or somehow notice that the system is way slower than it should be.
So... if an experienced person who just doesn't deal with hardware wouldn't spot this scam on the first glance, how would a layman get it?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If your company purchases volume quantities of electronic components, or depends on suppliers that do, you need to be aware of what is happening in the Shenzen area of China. It has become a hotbed of counterfeit components and other criminal activity. Guangdong is another region of China where this is happening. The Chinese government appears to be doing little or nothing to interfere. Many companies pop up just long enough to do a couple of shady deals and then vanish.
Our company buys wholesale quantities of electronic components, occasionally (but warily) from the Shenzen region of China. We have received re-marked and counterfeit parts which are accurate enough to get by our modest QA process. In one instance, a military customer of ours discovered a very expensive counterfeit part via industrial X-Ray before mounting it on their boards. As a result, we lost face with a good customer and had to take legal action to get our money back from our stateside supplier. Our supplier was stuck with the bill, as they purchased/imported the parts from Shenzen.
What ever you do, never pay up front. This sounds like a no brainer, but these people will feed on the buyer's desperation. If they won't accept NET 1 terms, then run away. Once a deal goes bad, you have no legal recourse. Buyer Beware.
The bios on the motherboard that the CPU is packaged with presumably reports the fake speed. I would assume that is why it's sold in a combo.
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But the sales department comes to you with a sad face. You made 85,000 3.4 GHz CPU's, but they have orders for only 1,000 of those, the rest of the orders are for 2GHz chips.
Guess what they tell you to do?: Run out to the asemmbly line and quickly push the buttons to label and blow the chip fuses so they advertise themselves as the lower speed grade. Seems like a waste, but it keeps the customers and accountants happy.
Happens all the time. I recently bought a batch of "300 volt" transistors. On the tester they all measured out at 650 to 670 volts.
So there's a *slight* chance these guys have a batch of underlabeled CPU's.
On another note, how do they plan to mask it on non-Windows OSs.
I saw this in the article:
"Chuanghui handles the remarking of the Celeron chips itself, Zhan said. In addition, the company provides buyers with software that masks the identify of the remarked Celerons from a computer's BIOS and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system, fooling the software into believing the chip is actually a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor, he said."
So, this explains why they're selling it with the motherboard, as it's a major component of the scam: they're masking the chip's speed at the BIOS level, probably with some sort of hack to the mobo's BIOS. The interesting thing, then is that any CPUID program would probably misdetect the chip, regardless of the OS. But put the chip into another motherboard, and you'd probably detect the correct chip type.
At least, that was my impression. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Frankly, this couldn't happen to a better bunch. I mean, really....the consumers think they get a deal of a lifetime, and go about their digital lives all happy and proud... Intel dumps some rank chips (last chance they get, now that Dell has seen the AMD light), Uncle Sam misses out (again) on tariffs and taxes he would just as soon spend on Humvees...the Taiwanese do what they do best, the Chinese make a killing in the bargain and I get to watch the whole thing go down from inside the PRC (I know the guys doing the masking) :)
This is sort of like the Brand X fountain pens you find that sometimes cost more than one from a respectable brand; the nib imprint reads "Iridium Point Germany" and I understand them to be rather hit-and-miss in terms of nib quality. This inscription makes two claims -- firstly, that the point is hardened with iridium (which is often taken within the context of writing instruments to actually and somewhat confusingly entail ruthenium or various alloys that may not contain iridium in the first place), and secondly, that the nib was made in Germany. Often, neither of these claims is true -- I've heard tale of untipped IPGs, with no iridium or anything else on the end, and the nibs tend to be made in China. Note that it doesn't say "Made in Germany," just "Iridium Point Germany."
But it happened with an AMD processor.
I've bought an AMD Atlhon XP 2500+ Barton, I've saw the box and the label, and also have checked the OPN (part number). When checking the processor using AMD's tool I've discovered that it was an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ TBread, less cache and slower CPU.
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You know I could get a bunch of these, set up at the flea market put one on the counter, opened up and put a sign on it celeron 1.7 GHz; people would see the remarked chip and think I was some moron that they could rip-off. When word got a round a bit, these things would be flyiing off the shelf, each one invoiced as celeron 1.7GHz!
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