Police grab 60,000 AMD CPUs

Chips said to be duds, re-marked for sale

Taiwanese police have seized some 60,000 allegedly dud AMD processors believed to have been made ready for sale as fully functioning product.

However, over 1m re-marked chips may already have entered European and Asian sales channels.

According to local news reports, the chips were taken from the premises of a company named as Hao Hwa Technology following a tip-off from AMD's Taiwanese operation. The CPUs, a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit parts, were said to be defective and earmarked for destruction.

Before that could take place, the chips were taken from one of AMD's packaging and testing facilities and shipped to Taiwan, the reports claim. There, the chips could have been labelled as standard AMD product.

Some appear to have already made it out into the channel. One report, in Chinese-language newspaper Liberty Times, claims that over 1m such parts, valued at TWD300m ($9.4m) have already been shipped to China and Germany. ®

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