Intel Everest Goes to Auction
Last summer we wrote about the Intel Everest series of high end CPU’s. These are processors which Intel makes for very specific customers (in this case High Frequency stock trading). They often have very little official information about them, and are sold at prices around $20,000 each. The latest in the series is the Intel Core i9-9990XE, with a max Turbo Frequency of 5.1GHz. According to Anandtech, these will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. These chips are a 14-core processor dissipating 255W, so will require rather good cooling, motherboard and Power Supply Support. The chips will be auctioned to ‘select OEM’s’ once per quarter throughout 2019. Intel isn’t likely deliberately making these chips scarce to increase the price, they are rather very rare speed bins for chips to attain. Out of thousands of chip’s tested, only a few will pass screening at this level of performance. These typically come from the center of a wafer (defects typically increase towards the edge of a wafer). It will be interesting to see what prices these attain, but then again, we may never know.
