Eight-core Sandy Bridge Chip Listed on eBay

There comes a time in every young processor’s life when it starts getting sampled to third parties. Once that happens, the chances of that next-generation processor appearing on auction sites like eBay rises considerably.

Case in point: Here’s an eight-core, hyper-threaded Sandy Bridge E-series processor that showed up on eBay just last week. Due in the fourth quarter of this year, the Sandy Bridge E chips are aimed directly at the enthusiast market. This chip, stamped with ‘Intel Confidential,’ boasts clock speeds of 1.60GHz and a 20MB of Level 3 cache. Intel's Turbo Boost technology has been disabled.

This listing has since been pulled (it’s likely Intel got wind of it). However, while it was live, the seller claimed the chip was ‘the only of its kind.’ Still, it might be hard to come by one now, we’re sure it will crop up some place else before Q42011. You just need to scrape together $1400 to make sure you can afford one when it does.

_{(via Engadget)}