14 DAY TRIAL // One would think that hardware developers would do their best to disclose as little information as possible concerning their upcoming releases. Still, not long after the pictures of an alleged Radeon HD 5670 motherboard somehow found their way to the Internet, one of Intel's products seems to have suffered a similar fate. Similar in the way that neither of the two products has been officially launched, although Intel's Xeon Westmere Gulftown did more than just be pictured on the net, namely it was auctioned and supposedly already sold.
The Xeon chip was probably an underclocked engineering sample, but it still stirred quite a bit of excitement, seeing how the eBay auction already ended. The processor is the six-core Core i9 CPU, which was benchmarked and previewed last month. Normally, one would reason that no person would risk revealing such a product, considering that samples are only sent by developers to a very limited number of manufacturers and, in case of such a serious leak, collaboration interruption is the immediate consequence.
Intel's Core i9 Xeon Westmere Gulftown Central Processing Unit is scheduled for release in early 2010 and was supposed to have a price of around $999. The one that the Taiwanese eBay user sold, however, got him an actual $1,200 and, according to Nordic Hardware (via Tom's Hardware), there is another such chip listed on the OCTeamDenmark forums, this one at a price of $850.
Although it may have been just an engineering sample of the real thing, the Xeon Gulftown is still a six-core chip with a clock speed of 2.4GHz. Still, most end-users will probably choose to put off buying such a chip until the official, non-overpriced version makes it to the mass-production stage, a moment that is steadily approaching.
Of course, no one can be completely sure that the actual listing was genuine and that the purchase actually took place. Still, whoever made the listing might have to put off making plans for how to spend the $1,200, as Intel will most likely track the chip and, given the blur-free nature of the picture that clearly rendered the identification marks, the Santa Clara-based enterprise should have little difficulty in finding the 'culprit,' so to speak.