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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.'"
By comparison, Intel sells the real thing for $401 in 1,000-unit quantities without a motherboard, according to the company's most recent price list.
Er yes.. but of course the difference is you're actually getting a genuine Intel chip running at 3.4GHz.. and not a chip with a sticker on it that says its a 3.4GHz when in fact its only a 1.7GHz!
I wonder whether they're supplying users with custom patches to the Linux-kernel as well to cover their processors' real innermost :>
If they actually include a motherboard with a halfway decent chipset, I'd probably buy one of those combos at 70US$ regardless of their fraudulent business practises, though.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips
I wonder why they're offering the masking software then ?
On another note, how do they plan to mask it on non-Windows OSs.
Intel have been rebranding p4 chips as celerons for years... ...haven't they?
Error: sig not found, Please reboot Universe and contact your local system administrator.
Just another area where they will soon overtake the US.
rewriting history since 2109
> Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips or to pass them off as more valuable processors. "I tell them the truth," he said.
> But Zhan acknowledged that Chuanghui has no control over how its customers represent the remarked chips when they resell them.
Maybe I can help him out with an argument there. Obviously, the "remarked" Celerons are more expensive, since he is selling the service of remarking. The chip itself is not changed: it is still as dead slow as it always was. Charging a premium price is obviously only possible if you trick your customer, which of course means selling the "remarked" Celeron as a P4. So by setting the pricing structure of the product he makes sure that the product can only be resold using fraud.
Claiming ignorance is not going to help there, it remains a big scam. Remember the empty cache ICs in 486 boards? This is no different.
Can the fakes be told from the real thing?
http://www.rajeshgoli.com
The article says that the software hides the identity of the chip from BIOS. It also says that the chip has the cache disabled. Is the cache present and disabled? Does that mean the software also enables the cache? That would be too cool.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
this is interesting to me given that they are quite clear and open about what you get for your money. Basically... you get a 4 cylinder engine that looks like and sounds like a 6 cylinder engine.
While I dont condone what they are doing... isnt it the guy who puts it in a box (or car) and sells it to you without disclosing the truth the real bad guy.
I thought that all current Celerons were Socket 478, and that all new P4's were LGA775?
Surely this will only work until someone with half a clue actually opens their case, won't it? What good is a sticker when a the chips, the mountings, and the heat-sink bracket are different between the celeron and p4?
The "lots of 100" is the worrier---it means they'll most likely go to dishonest resellers and system builders only too happy to hide the missing $322 in markup.
This is not my sandwich.
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."
BBQ promotes Global Warming
What's the big deal? There have always been and always will be liars, cheats, and thieves among humans.
Yours is one of the most idiotic and mind-numbingly baffling class of comments one can find on Slashdot (and that's saying something!).
Putting aside the fact that you clearly have no understanding of what constitutes news, the fact that you don't find fraud to be a "big deal" is revolting. If you bought a PC from Dell (for example) that was fraudulently mislabeled like the ones in this story, would you just shrug it off and say, "big deal"? Or would you be pissed? Really pissed, and demand not only a refund (or at least, hardware that matches what you paid for), but also look into possible legal actions you might take, as well as, say, thinking it worthwhile to inform others about the fraud?
Not only is this news, but it's also worth alerting others to as well. If fraud is routinely shrugged off as normal and not reported on, there will be less reason to *not* engage in fraud.
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'.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
No wonder those AMD64's are wipping the P4's!!
Zeb
rewriting history since 2109
I would love to see how they can change the internals of a Celeron 1.7GHz to make the CPUID instruction return the ID of a Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz...
Unless there is something I am not following, CPUID is executed entirely inside the processor and is impossible to fake.
Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips or to pass them off as more valuable processors. "I tell them the truth," he said.
I can't help but wonder, then, why bother masking the CPU's at all?
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...
This story reminds me of Packard-Bell repackaging used PCs as new in the 1990s.
"Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips or to pass them off as more valuable processors. "I tell them the truth," he said."
Except for the fact that they remark them, they don't hide anything. Wait..does this even make sense?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
This is why I always run Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) benchmarks on every system I build. I remember one time I bought a motherboard/CPU combo and when I ran Sandra it came out to be about 3 speed grades lower than I had paid for. I brought it back and the fellow at the store (who also built whitebox machines) wanted to know how I knew. Then of course he apologized profusely and gave me what I'd paid for in the first place.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
It is a big deal when people can't find work. It is a big deal when you pay lots of money for something that you don't get. It is a big deal when you're driving a car and it malfunctions.
Saying that something has occurred before does not justify anything.
A Passionate Independent Musician
Hate to break the news, but corruption and immoral behavior exists in all economic systems.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Perhaps it was just because they find it easier to say 'Pentium' than 'Cereron'.
This is an example of "Free Trade" and "Free Markets" in action!
No, this is exactly not an example of free trade. Fraud is not a component of free trade. A market economy depends on the customer's ability to actually get what's purchased. Scam artists like the Chinese company in question are parasitically abusing a free market's expectation of consistency and reliability in a brand (Intel, in this case), and the only people who call such BS examples of a free market are those who don't want a free market.
it sure shows one of the limitations of outsourcing to the cheapest source
No, this is not the cheapest source. It's a person lying about being the cheapest source. That doesn't show the limitation of bidding out your purchases, it shows the problems inherent in dealing with "businesses" in a country that, at the highest levels, encourages rampant copyright/brand scams.
You get what you pay for!
No, you get what's delivered to you. If what's delivered is fake, then you did not get what you paid for. In most western countries, one of the things we do pay for is a law enforcement framework that doesn't much put up with the fraudulent sales of such items. Since that's not being paid for in China, people doing business there frequently get exactly what's not being paid for.
I wonder who will be checking the authenticity of those upcoming Olympic medals?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
In terms of real world performance. 95% of all consumers wouldn't know the difference and if you told them they could increase the speed of their PC by 50% they probably wouldn't care. Or, if they did they would say that the result isn't good enough.
Next thing you know the Chinese are going to be making knock-off designer labels and cheap knock off electronics...oh wait.
... this wasn't figured out by tons of geeks using these "super deal" P4's until someone ran benchmark tests. I mean, come on, in everyday use like browsing the web or reading your email, who will notice the difference between 1.7 and 3.4?
Meh.
Are you being serious here? Fraud and dishonesty are not "allowed" in a free market systems. The reason democracy and free markets go hand in hand is because free markets require the rule of law and the protections of contracts the rule of law ensures.
If you want to see corruption go to a dictatorship or communist government. You could have a psudo-capitalist system in a dictatorship but it would be a far cry from a free market which involved the free exchange of goods and services.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Isn't this what trademark law was really intended for? If this isn't an abuse of a trademark, I have know clue what is. The masking of the chips identity is a trademark violation, so I would expect intel to come in with a big wooden stick and a rail gun fairly quickly to resolve this issue.
When all else fails, try.
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.
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.
between slapping a new badge on a car, and re-badging a processor. It's funny when someone does it to their own property, but a real shame when a retailer does it to a consumer.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Passing off a Celeron as a Pentium 4 is not difficult to do, as the two chips use the same basic design, according to a semiconductor executive in Taiwan familiar with the technical details of the two. The main difference between them is that most of the on-chip memory cache has been disabled in the Celerons, the executive said.
Which is why they run like mud. I had an HP with a Celeron and the thing was never efficient or speedy.
I don't see why everyone is so shocked -- this just means that the Chinese have learned the tenets of Capitalism far faster than we gave them credit for. They'll be selling us our own bridges before long.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
While most the denizens of Geek-Nerdistan Slashdotania are busy pouring over websites to eek that last 0.14% performance out of their machines most people don't worry that much about it. I can't say for example that anyone I know who isn't a Geek ever deals with any computer problem in any way other than turning the machine off and going away for a while. Not the kind of people who obsess over performance. The point is that most of us have been sold a bill of goods. A performance level that is as irrelvant as buying a Ferrari that you will never drive drive higher than 2nd of 7 gears.
Wow! It sounds like a real case to take to the ITO. Why not complain about something that is not condoned under international trade laws, other than quotas, government subsidies, etc.?
I just got back from a month-long trip from the US to China with my wife, who is originally Chinese. One Chinese person we met described China as "king of the fake". It's scary - there is so much fake stuff everywhere. Some of the clothes are not very good quality, so it's obvious (plus you can see a girl over in the corner ripping the Chinese label out and sewing a Dolce & Gabbana label in with needle and thread). But the handbags, watches, that sort of thing? You're going to be hard-perssed to tell the difference between that and the "real" thing.
When we arrived, my wife's dad told us not to buy tea in small towns, because he had seen a report on CCTV (China Central Television) saying that people were taking other leaves, dying them with green dye and using formaldehyde to cover the smell, then cutting that with a small amount of real tea. We laughed - until it happened. We brought them back a small canister of "best quality" tea that we'd picked up on our Yangtze River cruise. When they steeped it, the water turned bright, neon green. We looked closely - it was *not* tea. We don't know what it was, but it went in the toilet. Mind you, most of the people on our cruise were Chinese nationals, not outsiders!
One of my own coworkers who is Chinese has told that you can't even trust bottled water - there have been reports of companies filling the bottles with tap water (unboiled, of course) and just sealing the lid, and selling it with fake Chinese "brand" labels. We found some bottles with suspicious lids, just buying from regular markets. I'm thinking my lucky stars that I didn't get sick.
It's a bit scary. There's a certain level of trust required for capitalism to thrive. China has the capitalism in spades; but not the trust. It's absolutely the Wild, Wild East over there.
I remember buying a PIII-1000 processor and finding out if it worked on my motherboard (not supporting Tualatin, only Commpermine cores).
It was hell. Intel doesn't use the words "Tualatin" or "Coppermine" anywhere on their website, no difference datasheet etc. Finding out which chipsets support some CPU is definetly not a trivial task.
In the end I bought a CPU that looked like Tualatin but was in fact Coppermine.
China has been an independent country since about 200 BC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ date_of_independence.
US law doesn't apply there.
Oh well, what the hell...
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) :)
Resource-limited growth usually follows an S-curve--a period of exponential growth followed by a levelling out as resource limits kick in.
Reading this story reminded my of this User Friendly strip.
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."
Ah! There lies the main problem with out sourcing manufacturing overseas. The US and the EU have ways correcting bad behaviour was using trade sanctions. Punish the many for the actions of a few. When the country decides it's not profitable to dump counterfiet chips on the market, it stops. It's not enforcing US laws on China, it's coercing China to follow established international trade accords. Capitalism cannot work without a formal or informal structure. China would crush any attempt to do, what it's government owned companies do daily. If China were producing it's own cutting edge chips and say North Korea were taking factory rejects running at reduced clock speed and under bidding China with their own technology, what do you think would happen?
China has also signed numerous treaties as well. China has to comply with those treaties in order to remain in various global organizations, such as the UN, WTO, among others.
One treaty China has signed is the Berne convention, making copyright infringement illegal in China. The only reason it remains rampant is the is little enforcement other than token displays to appease other treaty signatories.
Development on the Dragon CPU isn't working out too well, then?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
These should be considered as counterfeit items and deemed illegal for import, just like any knockoff Gucci bag. There are anti-counterfeit task forces operating in most countries' Customs departments, and Intel should make sure to block import of these CPU/boards before they even get in the country.
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.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
They are supplying the motherboard too, so how hard would it be to put a ROM on it that intercepts the query to the CPU and always gives the same (false) answer?
Erm.
They may be properly speed-graded, but what about the cache?
Or are you saying these are Celerons that just happen to have 512K L2 cache?
Instead of slightly crippling your product to command top dollar in another, we could just lower the pricing to an average middle point. This has been going on forever and will continue because of the gouging done by the chipmakers.
Especially now with CPU speeds being essentially meaningless to the consumer, the celeron's time has passed. Dig the grave, have the funeral, cut your prices to a normal margin and let's move onward with technology.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
This just in.. eBay flooded with brand new P4 desktops...
is the chinese making knock-off RECORDING labels. Time to scare the RIAA, for a change.
What if I tell them when I purchase it?
Agent: Alright. We have a blue Ford Escort for you Mr. Seinfeld. Would you
like insurance?
Jerry: Yeah, you better give me the insurance, because I am gonna beat the hell
out of this car.
Would they deny selling me a $1000 computer and making their 20% on it? Most stores, I'd say no. They just don't care. And the reps of the big boys (dell, etc) aren't paid to care.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
One of the things you pay for from Intel is a gaurentee. If they claim a chip operates at speed X, they mean it. Should it fail to in any respect, they will replace it at no charge. However if you modify the chip, you invalidate that warantee.
It's fraud plain and simple and there's no justification.
"Has anybody out there *ever* gotten an Intel chip that matched the sticker on the outside of the box when they bought the whole thing ready-made?"
Yes, from Dell, several times in fact.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
This is an accurate description of what happens, except:
1.) They also blow fuses to reduce the cache to either 64kB or 128kB
2.) It's just as likely you'll get a batch where 50% were crap and only passed at the 1.7GHz speed or only had 128kB of working cache.
But I bet if INTEL said, "If we don't get a satisfactory resolution in this matter, we are going to have to look at how we supply Chinese manufacturers." The chinese would move heaven and earth to correct the problem.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
So googling is a crime in China, but massive fraud isn't?
I think some country needs to reexamine their legal system.
very funny. all sarcasm aside, you know that US was founded on and for the most part is a bastion of free expression and basic human rights. america has its flaws, but you can't seriously cast it in the same light as china. you're a fool if you think they're better off than we are when it comes to freedom.
No objective data here, but I firmly believe most users won't know the difference.
I can tell what processor and clock from how fast SETI runs, but most users can't. And don't run SETI.
Man, you really need that seminar!
The Chinese have terrible taste in pop music. It's all this bland soft adult contemporary like Celine Dion.
Smash it open and count the transistors
... - 2,367,194,217 - 2,367,194,218. Whew!br />
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 -
2,367,194,218? Wait a second, this is an AMD chip!
Consumer advocates need to apply some pressure to the vendors to slow down the upgrade cycle and sink some of that money into better manageability, usability and so one. For instance I would gladly give up a piece of my CPU for hardware crypto and authentication or a service processor that maintains the rest of the machine and software etc to do all those 'fake upgrades'.
Thankfully, now no longer trading. According to a hand-written note on the door of my local 'Time' branch, they even stiffed their retail employees.
Apparently, Watford Electronics has taken over the rights to Tiny computers. Begs the question as to how important brand recognition is versus reputation. I mean, Tiny are a *big* name, but the news of their demise and the general crapness that lead to it were all over the newspapers. So are Watford doing themselves a favour? Who knows?
Odd thing is that Watford have been in the business a long time, since the BBC Micro days, so I'd have thought they'd have a good reputation. According to these reviews, their 'Savastore' website looks to be every bit as bad as Tiny.
(My only experience with this site was when I ordered something, it turned out not to be in stock, and they- at least- informed me of the problem over the phone in reasonable time. That was 3 years ago, however.)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
One of the things you pay for from Intel is a gaurentee. If they claim a chip operates at speed X, they mean it.
That's not always the case. They have had to be pushed pretty hard into honoring that guarantee in the past. Remember the Pentium F00F bug?
I'm more interested in the question of how you can sell a Celeron as a Pentium and disguise it from the OS when the amount of cache is different in the two processors.
KeS
Why yes I have .. hundreds of times ... how many times have you not ?
Was it made by Sony?
why is there so much dell hate here? they support linux pretty well.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
my uncle has a celeron
would XP run on it, do you think?
about as well as a dog runs with no legs or torso
and with bricks tied to its head
at the bottom of a solid concrete pool
filled with dead corpses and rocks
so, about the same as it runs on my P4 then
more or less
Quote
meh
Just wait for these things to hit the US market. There are some stores that run the "we'll beat any competitor, just bring in the ad" promotion. :)
These processors are counterfeit, nothing more.
This is highly illegal, and any company knowingly selling these products should be prosecuted.
Now start to really worry...
If counterfeit components get into the electronics supply chain the effects can be absolutely diasterous. It could affect the operation of your home computer, the operation of the lifts in your office block, or make ABS brake system failed on your car, causing you to have a serious accident.
What is now happening is that old electronic equipment is being shipped to China. Valuable components are removed from the PCBs (using hazardous methods with no regard to the health of the people carrying out the work) and then the are cleaned up, re-marked and placed back on the market.
Why should this happen with old and obsolete components? it is because they are valuable to those people operating equipment with long lifecycles; namely trains, cars and aircraft.