News China's Powerstar CPU Seemingly 'Confirmed' as Intel Silicon via Geekbench

[Admin]

Chinese firm PowerLeader launched its first Powerstar CPU earlier this month, but now we are more certain it is a rebranded Intel Comet Lake chip.

China's Powerstar CPU Seemingly 'Confirmed' as Intel Silicon via Geekbench : Read more

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

It would be interesting to see how Intel reacts and responds to their official retail CPUs being used by a different company in such a manner. After all this is just a rebadged Intel part. Naming is slightly jumbled.

i3-10105

became:

p3-01105

EDIT:

If they are buying rebadged chips, or already have permission from Intel, then it's normal for a lot of companies to do this.

 

[tennis2]

If they are buying rebadged chips, or already have permission from Intel, then it's normal for a lot of companies to do this.

This being China, they more than likely have no such permissions.

The only reason they didn't just straight-up copy Intel's IP is the enormous cost of actually fabricating the chips (good luck getting a reputable fab to break IP copyright to sell you Intel chips). Much easier to just re-badge. There are plenty of shady back-alley methods of obtaining dirt cheap chips for rebadging, although volume would be come a problem at some point I'm sure.

 

[Exploding PSU]

I've seen my fair share of rebadged, or to put it bluntly, fake, "GTX 1050" being actually a BIOS-flashed Kepler GPUs. I've never really heard CPUs getting the same treatment. The most I've come across was a seller selling "core i7" only for it to arrive as Xeons, and saying "they perform similarly to (insert i7 CPU here)".

This is new to me.

 

[abufrejoval]

There is a long history of quite intensive collaboration between Intel and Chinese companies co-designing CPU chips, especially in the server arena e.g. the Tsinghua Jintide Xeons that have been presented on HotChips 2019 and talked about here.

What's much more interesting these days is how that needs to change with the political climate.

There surely plenty of copycats in China, but there is increasingly also genuine technological advances that deserve retrospective and prospective attention and investigation.

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

This being China, they more than likely have no such permissions.

The only reason they didn't just straight-up copy Intel's IP is the enormous cost of actually fabricating the chips (good luck getting a reputable fab to break IP copyright to sell you Intel chips). Much easier to just re-badge. There are plenty of shady back-alley methods of obtaining dirt cheap chips for rebadging, although volume would be come a problem at some point I'm sure.

That explanation sounds reasonable. And it obviously also makes sense.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Well, I'm just completely shocked by this... anyone else? 😆

Honestly, I don't care if any of these corporations get ripped off because they've ripped us off and lied to us without a second thought whenever it was the least bit expedient for them.

Cry me a river, they have billions of dollars and they'll be just fine.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

But there’s so sad about losing imaginary profit that they weren’t going to get any way. Yes. Boo &$# hoo

 

[Avro Arrow]

But there’s so sad about losing imaginary profit that they weren’t going to get any way. Yes. Boo &$# hoo

Want to know what a modern corporate executive looks like?

 

[Deleted member 14196]

😂

 

[TerryLaze]

Well, I'm just completely shocked by this... anyone else? 😆

Honestly, I don't care if any of these corporations get ripped off because they've ripped us off and lied to us without a second thought whenever it was the least bit expedient for them.

Cry me a river, they have billions of dollars and they'll be just fine.

They are not even getting ripped off, these are CPUs that are build by intel and that intel already sold and got the money from.
The only question is if intel sold the CPUs directly to powerleader or if powerleader got them from an OEM surplus, and even that question is more of an 'it would be interesting to know' and not really relevant, at least not for us, if the rebadging was done without their consent intel will sue them out of existence just because even if they didn't lose any moey.

 

[abufrejoval]

Another 2 cents on the topic:

One of my workstations uses a Xeon E5-2696v3 Haswell generation chip with 18 cores, which a) was never officially sold b) was "unobtainium" for personal use, as it was based on the biggest Haswell Xeon the E5-2699V3 ever costing

I got mine via e-Bay from China some years ago at a (then) rather reasonable €700 and was a bit curious about how it came to exist and be offered at these prices.

There had been plenty of engineering sample Xeons on e-Bay and I knew their story, but this wasn't one of those, but a genuinely good chip, actually even greater than the E5-2699V3, beause it had a slightly higher turbo clock at 3.8 vs. 3.6 GHz. Yes, TDP was officially up to 150 Watts, but that just as bogus as some perfectly binned Harpertown Xeons I'd run across earlier, which were reported as 150 Watt TDP units, but ran perfectly cool at more like 50 Watts.

This Xeon likewise is very hard to push beyond 110 Watts even with the meanest Prime95 and a BCLK overclock pushing it to 4 GHz max (on two cores) around 2.9 GHz all core, if I remember correctly.

It was clearly a brand new CPU, had not been used by a hyperscaler nor did it seem stolen: there was far too many of them around for a long time to make that plausible.

Instead I heard that Intel just took their sweet time to disassemble the 22nm production lines and did some runs of Haswell Xeon especially for the Chinese hyperscaler market right into the Skylake era, but with a bit of boardroom shenanigans to ensure that these Xeons wouldn't just flow back into Western markets and hurt Skylake sales there. And some of those finally found their way into surplus channels later like mine.

There is always tons of inventory Intel keeps and evetually clears, preferably in the Chinese market, because those guys are quick to turn them into low-to-no-support mini-series product: there is plenty of stuff sold as new on Aliexpress, that's too old to run Windows 11 today.

But there is also a chance that Intel will run new wafers on old equipment if someone is willing to pick up significant enough volume, ...if only to sell on to Russia.

So these Cannon-Lakes could be old inventory or they could be extra fab runs of equipement still standing around somewhere. The chances of it completely without intel's sanction and knowledge, however, are rather slim.

 

[Taserface]

The Powerstar looks like it was sandblasted and then laser marked.

 

[Co BIY]

Anything sold at this volume and transparency is likely a legitimate rebadge with Intel's full cooperation.

I theorize that the rebadge and a certain amount of exclusively local content (unique IHS, local labeling, packaging, marketing, headquarters write-offs, government officials' cooperation, propaganda value ) allow favorable market access that otherwise would not be available.

Chinese Bureaucracy was "Byzantine" for many centuries before the Byzantine's even existed.

 

[abufrejoval]

Anything sold at this volume and transparency is likely a legitimate rebadge with Intel's full cooperation.

I theorize that the rebadge and a certain amount of exclusively local content (unique IHS, local labeling, packaging, marketing, headquarters write-offs, government officials' cooperation, propaganda value ) allow favorable market access that otherwise would not be available.

Chinese Bureaucracy was "Byzantine" for many centuries before the Byzantine's even existed.

Legitimate from Intel's point of view--very likely.

Legitimate from government imposed trade restrictions or embargo point of view--that depends on the governments in volved.

These are low-end chips that might go into schools or government agencies: in other words, the Chinese government might want to have them appear like a proud domestic product instead of having been imported from the Western bully...

But I wouldn't be surprised to see quite a few of them go North-East, since there are "no limits to their friendship".

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

It appears that Powerleader has now published an official statement in which the company states that the new CPUs were designed in partnership with Intel and utilize a slightly custom design.

The company doesn't go into a lot of detail as to what these custom changes are but it could be related to software and firmware-level support to make them appear as Powerstar chips instead of the Intel Core CPUs that they really are.

Powerleader had the following main points to make:

• Powerleader's first CPU is a customized CPU product launched with the support of Intel Corporation.
• Powerstar CPUs are mainly used by branded PC terminals in the commercial market.
• Powerstar CPU has not declared any projects and subsidies to relevant government departments.

The company released the statement after several websites had pointed out that Powerstar was utilizing Intel core technology and rebranding it as their own would fall under infringement.