[109264] in Cypherpunks
Intel SN in P-II chips!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Mon Mar 15 21:06:10 1999
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:28:38 +0100 (CET)
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990313-000003.html
Posted 15/03/99 11:45am by Mike Magee
Unique serial number exists in all 25 micron Intel chips
An architect who currently works for Intel US has now confirmed what we
were beginning to suspect all along -- every .25 micron Intel chip has the
processor serial number (PSN).
The chip designer, who revealed the news under strict conditions of
anyonymity, said: "Any .25 micron core including the PII, all Celerons and
all current Xeons have had serialisation ever since .25 micron technology
started." The exception is the .25 Tillamook P5 MMX, he said.
Since we posted our original story on Saturday, however, more information
has come to light. Intel's own document, The Pentium II Xeon Processor
Server Platform System Management Guide which is order no. #243835-001
confirms the existence of the PSN in the Xeon. See the processor's PIROM,
table one. It's called Processor Electronic Signature. Table One is on page
20. Also see 4.4.1.5 on page 19.
This morning (Monday) we placed a call to Intel and it promised it would
get back to us. We now have that statement.
A representative said: "A prototype of the circuitry has been present in
some PII and Celeron parts, purely for validation and testing purposes.
"It wasn't on all, by any means. It was disabled during the manufacturing
process."
He would not say which proportion of the PII core had the serial number,
nor would he say whether the feature is disabled in BIOS. But he did
confirm that the "erratum" we wrote about last week was essentially a batch
of Dixon core chips which escaped this process.
This means that Intel is and was shipping products with the serialisation
number switched off. The only exception is the Tillamook P5 .25 micron
parts, the Intel chip architect, who originally tipped us off, said.
But why didn't Intel tell us and the whole world what it was doing then,
and why?
It seems that maybe it just thought it would lump in the PSN announcement
to co-incide with the introduction of Katmai-PIII.
So when we first broke the story about the Mobile PII with Dixon core, the
only "erratum" was that Intel forgot to turn it off. Intriguing.
How US bodies pushing for a boycott of Intel parts will react to all of
this is even more interesting. ®
Related Stories
Dixon Intel PIIs have serial numbers -- it's a bug
Intel stealth shipping Coppermine on Dixon parts?
Unique ID customer numbers on mobile PIIs no accident
Pentium II Xeons have serial numbers too
Gelsinger "brains" behind shipping chips with PSN switched on
Opinion: Intel the Chipzilla just naive
