Dressed up to the nines
Blink and you'd have missed it, but a transaction on eBay just went through to sell an as-of-yet unreleased Intel Core i9 chip to one very early adopter for a whopping $1,200.
First spotted by BSN, it's still unclear whether the chip was actually sold to a punter or not, but either way the auction for it is over.
Put up for sale by a Taiwanese eBay seller, the description on the item boasted a six-core, 2.4GHz Xeon Westmere 'Gulftown' processor and showing a picture of the purported chip with its identification marks clearly showing, which means Intel will have a fairly good idea which 32nm chip skipped the coop.
The seller had listed his item as "tested and 100 per cent working," and added it was compatible with single x58 and dual (5520, 5500) 1366 socket boards.
Of course, it could be that the chip is just another engineering sample, like ones being flogged on the Nordic market for about 800 euros a piece.
But seeing as most engineering samples tend to be underclocked, we're not sure one would want to cough up $1,200 for one, except for the novelty of having been amongst the first in the world to plug it into their system.
