Fake chip storm rocks China’s science elite

[MD Willington]

Pretty sad in the fact that they took a Motorola (IIRC) chipset, sanded off the top and remarked it, and sold it as their own. Actually pretty embarrassing for the CCP... The CCP tends to frown on being embarrassed on a global scale.

China's scientific establishment has been shaken by the sacking of a dean at one its most prestigious universities for falsely claiming to have invented a much-praised “indigenous” computer chip.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/aa4c6b98-e3...0779e2340.html

http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-3-21/39544.html

[Galvanized]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

I read both. *shakes head* The NEC story Will posted was a good'en too.
It might reach a point for a dedicated forum here on piracy & fakes of hardware.

[willawake]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

there is already a forum for fake chips. but it is a pro forum. only brokers and distributors are welcome
http://www.brokerlynx.net/

[Galvanized]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

Thanks Will, marked for late night reading.

[MD Willington]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

We see plenty of fake processors in the AMD forums, first it was fake socket A 3200+ processors, usually remarked XP2500+ or mobile processors. Latest has been Geode NX modified and labelled as Socket A Semprons... The trouble people go through to make an extra buck.. Also have had problems with the 64 bit processors showing up in bundles posting as "Engineering" samples... Pretty much a headache for all involved.

MD

[Topcat]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

As if Walmart wasnt bad enough with their cheap china-made crap, now those silly chinese are invading and murdering our high-end electronics......... will it never end.

Good reads!

[Rubycon]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

I remember fake L2 cache memory (SRAM?) used on Socket 3 i486 boards in the mid to late 90's. They were 16 pin DIPS and often the markings were removed by sanding.

[Rainbow]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

That cache chips were really fake - just empty plastic blocks with legs Some boards were even designed for this - the traces from the "cache" go nowhere. Some other were designed for real cache and the fake cache was installed to reduce cost. The BIOS was also modified to show that cache is installed even if it's not. I removed the fake chips on one of these boards, installed sockets instead and inserted 256KB of real cache - it still runs now in my router.

[kc8adu]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

i remember exposing the "writeback" cache scam at computerfest.several vendors were pissed!
had a device tester/programmer set up and a sign that said is the cache on your new board real? test it here.one of the scammers tried to involve computerfest folks and tried to get me removed from the show.backfired bigtime as the guy who came to investigate had just bought a suspect board and went back to his car to get it.he was pissed when he found out he had been ripped off.he made an announcement over the pa and i had a line 150 deep form of folks wanting to test the cache.the scammers packed up and left fast!
btw some scammers went so far as snipping off the cache enable jumpers on the boards.
next year one of the scammers was back under a different name.i went over there and hollered hey buddie do ya have any more of those fake cach chips?i brought the tester again.
everyone at the table scattered and he packed up and left again!

[Galvanized]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

kc8, Wish I could have seen the covers pulled

BWAHAHAHA!

[arneson]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

-just empty plastic blocks with legs

OMG I'll have nightmares about this.

[Rainbow]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

I scanned this when removing that fake cache chips. One of them is split in half - to see that there really isn't anything inside.

[arneson]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

So the label is just a message, I'll be writeback with your cache?

[zepper]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China’s science elite

re. the fake "WriteBack" cache chips...

I don't know how long ago those fake cache chips were floating around - around the time of the 486/AMD k5/k6 CPU. Found a number of cheap mobos that had them back then (another clue was that they were soldered in - no respectable outfit soldered cache in those days, all socketed) - The BIOS was hard-wired to report 256kB L2 cache too, but if you tested with Cachechk, it would come back bad. Shows how dumb the crooks were, couldn't even be bothered to counterfeit a real company logo. The mobos were probably made by some subsidiary or PC Cheaps...

.bh.

[Rainbow]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

Fake cache chips were present on many PC Chips late 486 and early Pentium boards. On Pentium boards, they used newer SMD fake chips I also read somewhere that there were also fake chips with Alliance Semiconductor logo.
M919 is "great" example - a 486 board with SMD cache chips, of course fake. And fake layout around them too - traces going nowhere - because these fake chips had all pins connected together.

[Rubycon]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

I believe the motherboard brand was "Ocean" and "Octek".

I used to save everything but had to get rid of my "collection" as I am limited on stowage space where I live now. :P

I would not be surprised if they started faking heatsinks. (Solid metal bars instead of heatpipes!)

There's really cheap "shake charger" flashlights that have a piece that moves when you shake it but in reality there's no magnet and the "coils" are not connected to anything. The real mccoy uses a samarium cobalt magnet (expensive) and charges a wet cap for storage. The idea is you never need batteries. It's ok, but more of a geek fetish thing than anything else.

[japlytic]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

I've also seen fake parity chips in memory modules around the mid 90s as well...

[linuxguru]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

The parity SIMMs also came with a version that returned the expected parity (basically an 8-input XOR gate) of the current byte being read; writes only went to the 8 bits of real DRAM and the parity wasn't stored. This SIMM could be used on certain boards that needed 9-bit SIMMs to function. Utter crap, similar to the bad caps scenario - it probably saved about $1/SIMM at its peak.

[hardwareguy]

Re: Fake chip storm rocks China's science elite

re. the fake "WriteBack" cache chips...

I don't know how long ago those fake cache chips were floating around - around the time of the 486/AMD k5/k6 CPU. Found a number of cheap mobos that had them back then (another clue was that they were soldered in - no respectable outfit soldered cache in those days, all socketed) - The BIOS was hard-wired to report 256kB L2 cache too, but if you tested with Cachechk, it would come back bad. Shows how dumb the crooks were, couldn't even be bothered to counterfeit a real company logo. The mobos were probably made by some subsidiary or PC Cheaps...

.bh.

You're damn right! It sure was PC Chips..... I remember trying to fix a PC equipped with one of those boards while I was in high school for extra summer cash. To make a long story short, I never got the performance up and I never stopped the GPFs and hangs..... I sold the customer an old PC with a Pentium MMX 166 and 256KB of REAL PBSRAM (and good caps!) for $100. He was happy after I got the old POS out of his life forever.

The board he had was the later fake cache board, nice layout, had VESA Local Bus AND PCI, but NO CACHE! Too bad, I could have used one of those after upgrading from a 486DX/2 66 to a 5x86 133! I missed my nice VLB card, until I got the new PCI card that is...

The PC Chips Story in GREAT DETAIL: http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html