Computer Chip Scam, Pentium Pirates - AMD Isn’t Immune, Either
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Rival chip maker AMD has experienced the problem as well. Back in 2004, the company introduced extra measures to help consumers and resellers tell the difference between real AMD products and imitations. It began tagging chips sold in Southeast Asia with stickers bearing serial numbers and the names of AMD’s authorized distributors in the respective countries.
That move was on top of the bar codes the company put on its Athlon XP processors to “improve product traceability.” A company representative observed at the time that “This is not a worldwide program, more of a regional program, specifically for Asian countries. We launched this program to ensure that consumers are aware that they are purchasing genuine AMD boxes.” One can infer from the regional nature of the program that the problem itself is regional rather than worldwide.
Just calling it regional doesn’t make the problem insignificant – and it certainly doesn’t make it go away. Going back to Chuanghui, the company started offering remarked chips about a year ago, and now sells 1,000 every month. Most of the buyers are located in Asia and Africa. While Chuanghui may be up front about their chip remarking, they have no control over how someone else – such as a computer maker – may represent the chips when they resell them.
Intel has taken a wider approach to foiling chip remarkers in the past. Back in 1999, when chip speeds were commonly measured in MHz rather than GHz, it posted a free software utility to its website that, when downloaded, told consumers both the actual speed of their processor and the speed at which it was intended to run. It also earned the ire of overclockers at that time by making some chips more difficult to overclock, in the interests of preventing remarkers from being able to fool users as easily.
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