Intel may be a little over 6 months away from unveiling its new Sandy Bridge-EP platform, but it's understandable that the company is circulating engineering samples among closely tied industry partners. One such sample fell into the right (wrong, for Intel) hands, and is being pawned away on ebay for a handsome price. The current bid stands at US $1,359.99.

The chip itself is Q19D ES, an 8-core Sandy Bridge-EP in the LGA2011 package. The chip is said to have 8 cores, and 16 threads with HyperThreading enabled. It is being sold as Core i7, though some sources say the chip could be from Xeon E5-4600 or E5-2600 series (4600 is four-socket capable, 2600 is dual-socket capable). The chip is clocked at 1.60 GHz, and holds 20 MB shared cache according to the seller, though even the highest-end LGA2011 Core i7 is said to hold no more than 15 MB L3 (shared) cache. L3 is the only shared cache.The chip is compatible with Patsburg C600 or Patsburg-HEDT X79, for enterprise and client platforms respectively, but with a scarcity of LGA2011 motherboard samples till Computex, only time will tell if this non-refundable chip being sold becomes someone's new supercool toy or epicfail paperweight. The item can be found here.