It's been kind of a double-handed news day for chip maker AMD.
First the good news: the company has unveiled a mobile processor designed for portable media players, reports VNUnet.com
The low-power Au1200 chip integrates media handling facilities on the silicon to keep costs to a minimum.
The chip maker said that it has already signed agreements with media player manufacturers to develop devices using the processor.
Personal video recorder manufacturer TiVo is developing a series of handheld media players, dubbed TiVo-To-Go, that can download programmes from the recorders to view on the move... consumer electronics company GoVideo, First International Computer and Implicit Networks have also announced the development of players using the chip.
Now the bad news (from PC Pro:
Police Friday raided an electronics company located in southern Taiwan, and seized a total of 60,000 suspect AMD CPUs.
The suspect [units] were defective CPUs that would normally have been destroyed. However, market sources said that the CPUs might have been stolen from one of AMD's three packaging and testing plants in Asia and shipped to Taiwan for re-marking.
Sources at AMD Taiwan confirmed that the 60,000 seized in Taiwan are defective CPUs rejected by the company, however, the company has officially refused to comment on the seized products.
A report from a Chinese newspaper said that more than 1 million re-marked chips had been sent to Germany and China - with a street value of nearly $10M.
I'm not sure we've heard the last of this story.
