New 3-D Holographic Labels for AMD

One of the world’s most popular chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), will soon be putting new holographic labels on the boxed processors they sell. This will help consumers and businesses to tell that any products with this new holographic logo are officially from the folks at AMD.

InfoWorld has a great article on the latest innovation from AMD.

The holographic label will appear on the bottom left corner of the packaging for boxed Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64, Sempron, and Opteron chips, the company said. AMD’s boxed processors are often purchased by system builders and PC buyers choosing their own components. They come with a heatsink and a fan and carry a three-year limited warranty.

The introduction of the new security feature follows a report last week from Taiwanese online news agency DigiTimes that Taiwanese police seized 60,00 defective AMD chips from a group planning to re-mark the chips and sell them in Germany and China. By re-marking chips criminals can resell them as more valuable models, with a higher clock speed or on-chip cache, for instance.

PC World also had an article about this issue earlier today.

The introduction of the new security feature follows a report last week from Taiwanese online news agency DigiTimes that Taiwanese police seized 60,000 defective AMD chips from a group planning to re-mark the chips and sell them in Germany and China. By re-marking chips criminals can resell them as more valuable models, with a higher clock speed or on-chip cache, for instance.

An AMD spokesperson in Germany says that the company is not aware of any false AMD products having entered the distribution channel from Taiwan, and he rejects a suggestion that the new packaging program was introduced as a result of the reported defective chips.

Hopefully this will help keep the evil folks out there from trying to pass off their junk as AMD products.