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Atop chief accused of selling stolen AMD chips

Remarking saga continues

AMD has accused the chairman of Atop, a Taiwanese electronics firm, of masterminding the theft and re-sale of 60,000 dud chips earlier this year, according to police sources cited by local media.

Atop chairman Chen Yue-han denies the allegations, Chinese-language newspaper the Liberty Times reports, by way of DigiTimes. The paper said that AMD has begun legal action against Chen. The paper cited Taiwanese police sources.

According to Liberty Times, Chen said he was involved in 2003 in the legal importation and sale of secondhand AMD processors. Along with a fellow, unnamed, Atop shareholder, Chen formed a company called DCP, based in Singapore. DCP acquired, cleaned and re-tested a large quantity of used chips before selling them on to companies around the world.

Police in Taiwan sized the dud chips in January following a tip-off from AMD's Taiwan operation. The CPUs, a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit parts, were said to be defective and earmarked for destruction. According to police reports, the chips came out of AMD's Singapore testing plant and should have been destroyed two years ago.

At the time of the seizure, more than 1m such parts, then valued at TW$300m ($9.4m) had already been shipped to China and Germany, Liberty Times says.

Atop has not commented on the Liberty Times story, but AMD told The Register is had not engaged in legal action against Chen or made any public accusations against him. ®

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