[dehrmann]

> 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.

[bombcar]

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.

[moonbug]

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

[whoopdedo]

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

[rasz]

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...

[paranoidrobot]

> 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.

[rasz]

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.

[M277]

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."