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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

> But didn't you say it'd help to prevent counterfeiting of chips?

The stolen part I get, but did it used to be easier to counterfeit chips? There's a lot that goes into making something that looks like a PIII, and even then, I assume Intel had state-of-the-art fabs, so I'm surprised this was a concern.

The hardware scams I've heard of stamping better specs on something, for hard drives, a firmware hack that makes it appear to be higher capacity, and unauthorized hardware made in off-hours on the same production line.

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Those are the direct scams - but there are also lesser scams where a supplier replaces a part with a working part made by another manufacturer and pockets the difference. The parts may work correctly (in some cases it was only discovered because the parts worked FASTER than expected) - but it is fraud.

a common problem back then was chips getting remarked as higher clock bin parts.

I felt at the time that when Intel said "counterfeit" they really meant "clones".

Yes, this was what immediately came to my mind as well.

For an interesting, albeit slightly unrelated read, see:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art

>"Prior to 1984, these doodles also served a practical purpose. If a competitor produced a similar chip, and examination showed it contained the same doodles, then this was strong evidence that the design was copied (a copyright violation) and not independently derived."

What Intel meant at the time was "someone is selling our chips relabeled to a higher SKU and pocketing our cut". This happened in 1996 with criminal gang remarking 120 to 150, 133 to 166, etc, pocketing extra ~$30-50 per CPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsKjX6UGYUQ

Intel was so pissed someone else was making money on binning they locked multiplier on later 133/166/200, all Pentium MMX and later models ending easy overclocking.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/pentium-200mhz-multipli...

> later models ending easy overclocking.

Except the classic case of the Celeron 300a which let you go from 300Mhz to 450Mhz with a simple change of a motherboard FSB clock setting.

I was nervous when I ordered the parts - but stunned that it was so easy for me to do, and left me with a machine that was effectively faster than anything Intel was officially selling at the time.

FSB (and later BCLK) overclocking is what we got left with for a while until Intel killed that too with Sandy Bridge just after introducing special upscale K series CPUs generation earlier with Nehalem. All in an effort to sell gimped parts while charging extra for the whole deal.

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