14 DAY TRIAL // While some might have hoped for what was probably a slip-up to last longer, if not be followed up by more, it seems that whatever caused the premature unveiling of a certain next-generation chip has been remedied, so to speak.
One would think that the design flaw in the 6-Series chipset that caused notebook and motherboard sales to halt en masse during the first quarter would be the only major slip-up on Intel's part for a while.
Granted, a certain event involving eBay and an as yet unreleased processor doesn't really rank so high on the blunder scale, but it will be remembered nonetheless.
Basically, a few days ago, an 8-core Sandy Bridge-E central processing unit showed up on eBay, for the price of $1,399.
The first shocking thing about this was, naturally, the fact that 8-core units aren't expected to debut before the fourth quarter of the ongoing year (2011).
As one would have expected, the processor has now been pulled off eBay, possibly at Intel's urging, since the unit was supposed to remain unknown for months still.
Nevertheless, as some people say, the cat is out of the bag, meaning that all the information has now leaked and will be quite impossible to purge from consumer minds.
The 8-core chip had a base clock speed of 1.6 GHz and, although the “E” does stand for Enthusiast, the newcomer is just as or more likely to be used in servers.
That said, the L3 cache memory is of 20 MB and the Turbo Boost technology will be able to push one or more cores higher in terms of frequency, at the expense of the rest, when not all are utilized.
As already mentioned, the fourth quarter of 2011 is when mass production will start. By then, LGA 2011 motherboards should have already been unleashed (Computex 2011 is when the first mainboards will come out).