“Only” 60 Thousands Fake AMD Chips Arrested, Million Already Shipped

5 Jan, 2005 at 9:58pm ET Article published in Tech

A Taiwan-based web-site Monday posted more information on the matter of counterfeit processors by Advanced Micro Devices seized end last week by Taiwanese authorities.

“Based on tips provided by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Taiwan, the police Friday raided an electronics company located in Tainan, southern Taiwan, and seized a total of 60 000 suspect AMD CPUs. The suspect AMD CPUs, including K7 [AMD Athlon XP] and K8 [AMD Athlon 64] models, were defective CPUs that would normally have been destroyed,” claims an article posted on Taiwan-based web-site DigiTimes.

The number of chips reported to have been arrested is much less compared to the original report by another Asian web-site, who claimed that over a million of processors were seized during the raid. However, over a million re-marked AMD CPUs have allegedly been shipped to Germany and China, the Chinese-language Liberty Times reported Saturday, adding that the value of the seized CPUs would be about NT$300 million (about US$9.46 million), according to DigiTimes.

The microprocessors that were illegally sold might have been stolen from one of AMD’s three packaging and testing plants in Asia and shipped to Taiwan for re-marking. The possible source of the defective chips could be one of AMD’s packaging and testing plants in Singapore or Malaysia, or in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province (China), said the sources.

Source: X-Bit Labs

Comments

5 Jan 2005 ~ 11:14pm Access_Denied ohhh great.. :shakehead
6 Jan 2005 ~ 12:11pm a2jfreak This reminds me . . . I just got a really good deal on 50 Athlon64s. They're S939 2.4GHz. I can let them go for $25 each.
6 Jan 2005 ~ 2:12pm EMT Wow, I went to Suzhou, China... if only I'd known! It's a fair-sized city just northwest of Shanghai.
6 Jan 2005 ~ 2:41pm mmonnin They are defective tho.