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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!
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.
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.
"I'd probably buy one of those combos at 70US$ regardless of their fraudulent business practises, though."
Then you are also part of the problem.
Consumers supporting known businesses which have no ethic drive the good businesses with ethics out of business. Why don't you just see what hardware Microsoft has to offer you for your evangelical services?
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
No, this is collusion.
They cannot argue there is any legitemate reason to do this. Just because they are providing someone else with the tools to rip you off doesn't make them any less complicit in the act.
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 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.
You're missing the point. The problem comes when the cpu+board combo
is put into a beige box and sold on as a P4, when really it's a Celeron.
The reseller of the beige-box is unlikely to advise their customers that
they're being done. However, if a customer takes the beige box back to
the shop, then the reseller could deny that they knew that the rebranding
was their fault.
It's a scam. I hope Intel sues!
return 0; }
Article mentions the remarker is providing "software". This is very likely a patch to Windows to intercept the calls to the chip fetching its stats, and provide false information back to the caller. This means that windows, and most tools you run under windows, will report whatever the software wants you to hear. ("p4") Others here have kicked around ideas for other ways to verify what sort of a chip it is... try to execute instructions that are p4-only, etc. This is probably the only way to really verify it, besides benchmarking your machine and noticing the huge descrepency in average instruction speed.
So this is not something you'd miss if you were buying the board and chip stand-alone. But if you bought an assembed system, the person that did the assembly is probably full well aware it's a 1.7 and has pre-installed windows and that wonderful "patch" so it reports to you, the consumer, it's a P4. And that's almost certainly what they willl advertise it to you as. The average consumer might just think their machine isn't quite as fast as they had expected, would just blame windows or something else for the slowness, and would eat the $350 fraud without knowing it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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...
I would love to see them change it to "This is a fake CPU and you paid over the odds for it you complete and utter mug!!"... and see how many of their customers noticed!
Perhaps it was just because they find it easier to say 'Pentium' than 'Cereron'.
Nope. The scam targets windows boxes since most (if not all) PCs come with windows preinstalled. As soon as you install linux, their scam will be expossed.
And even if they did provide kernel patches for linux preinstalled PCs, it wouldn't work. The scam would show on your next kernel update.
This targets only windows users. The ones who never install another OS or have never removed their cpu from the m/b.
VStrider.
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.
Next thing you know the Chinese are going to be making knock-off designer labels and cheap knock off electronics...oh wait.
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.
Goofy analogy. No, when someone sells you a computer, they don't know that you'll use it to pirate music, or commit identity theft, or whatever - maybe you will, maybe you won't, and they don't have any control over it regardless. When these guys sell a thousand of their chips to some computer manufacturer, they know goddamn well that the buyer is going to use these things to rip people off - that's the only possible reason someone would buy these things, to rip people off.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
The problem is after all the tariffs from importing the combo back to US, it'll end up costing more than it would if you bought the real 3.6 locally...
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.
Hardware from Microsoft? You want him to buy an Xbox?
More seriously, there is actually a way past a lot of this. The fraudulent vendor may have replaced the BIOS on the motherboards, to lie about the specs of the hardware to the display screens and in turn to the operating system. Some interesting hacks are available that way to set the system clocks to one speed, and lie about it to the OS. Alternatively, they've simply replaced the bits of Windows that display the processor characteristics.
To get past the Windows operating system flaws, use a Knoppix live CD/DVD to boot the system and record its characteristics. To get past BIOS whackiness, you need an open source BIOS. BIOS's are currently a closed source nightmare, stuffed with legacy features they don't need at the cost of features they should have. But the LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS projects are doing good work, and I'd love to see them polished up enough to use commercially. This would flat-out solve a lot of problems talking to the guts of your hardware from the operating system level, to read its temperature or read out things like the actual chipsets while the system is running, even resetting the BIOS options while the system is running and without needing someone sitting there with a keyboard and monitor at the next reboot.
IBM dual 2.0GHz Xeon workstation w/ HW SCSI RAID 0/1/5 for sale
Is that a link to an example, or just an unfortunate coincidence?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
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."
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.
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!?
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?
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!