Home-grown chip ‘identical to CPU made by Intel’
A purported new “home-grown” chip introduced by a Chinese computer hardware producer this month is suspected to be a rebadged integrated circuit from Intel Corp, according to a report by online tech news site Tom’s Hardware, based on the results of a central processing unit (CPU) benchmark testing via online cross-platform utility Geekbench.
Testing site Geekbench, a platform run by Canadian software developer Primate Labs, published the key parameters of Chinese firm Powerleader’s Powerstar P3-01105 CPUs on May 26 and found the chips were identical to Intel’s Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.
The Post was unable to independently verify whether the
Powerleader chip was an Intel chip under the skin.
Shenzhen-based Powerleader did not respond to requests for comments. Phone calls to its Shenzhen head office and its sales service lines went unanswered.
Intel has not made any comment on the chips. The Geekbench findings were widely reported by both Chinese and foreign media outlets focusing on hardware.
If confirmed, it would be another scandal in China’s pursuit of indigenous chips following the infamous Hanxin case in 2006 when a government investigation found that the country’s claimed first home-grown computer chip was a deliberate fraud by Chen Jin at Shanghai’s prestigious Jiaotong University.
Powerleader, which has been manufacturing servers and computers for industrial users since 1997, held a press conference on May 7 to release the first generation of Powerstar CPUs.
According to its press release, the Powerstar CPUs are developed based upon x86 structure and are suited for “government, education, energy, industry, finance, healthcare, gaming and retailing”.
The company also launched desktops and workstations equipped with the chip and said it would manufacture such equipment at its production facilities in Guangdong, Sichuan, Hunan, Beijing, Hebei, Guangxi, Shaanxi and Jiangsu, according to its press release.
China has been trying for years to develop its own CPU, but its development was restricted by hurdles such as lack of intellectual property (IP) and instruction set architecture. A lack of open-standard instruction set architecture and semiconductor IP has been a major obstacle, preventing the country from building its own CPUs, as X86 and Arm’s architecture are controlled by Intel and British firm Arm respectively. Chinese chip design firms have accelerated their embrace of the open-standard RISC-V over the past few years.
Powerleader has no track record in developing its own chip.
According to the company’s website, its flagship products use Intel chips.