Intel Engineers Busted Selling Test CPUs On eBay

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I have a great idea, let's throw away a career as an engineer at Intel so we can make a few bucks on eBay. I am astounded how stupid some people can be, it's not like they weren't going to get caught.

Detectives had been tracking the suspects since September, conducting a raid on their homes last month, taking 178 sample CPUs – worth an estimated $82,500—into police custody. According to the CIB’s statement, the suspects admitted to selling more than 500 Intel engineering sample CPUs since 2009.
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So thats where all those ES cpu's on ebay were coming from
 
robble said:
damn, why didn't i grab one of those?
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Cause you'd be paying a higher price for a chip that's not as good as the retail one, and would have no way of re-selling it once that retail chip hits the market?
 
*Looks around at half the people in the distributed computing forum... keeps my mouth shut*

Yeah intel! Ya can have them back! Not good for folding anyway! :p
 
Trackr said:
Cause you'd be paying a higher price for a chip that's not as good as the retail one, and would have no way of re-selling it once that retail chip hits the market?
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Never used ES chips have you?
 
Trackr said:
Cause you'd be paying a higher price for a chip that's not as good as the retail one, and would have no way of re-selling it once that retail chip hits the market?
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ES samples are sometimes worth gold.

"Being engineering samples, the CPUs were sometimes of a rare type, said the CIB, making them all the more desirable to tinkerers looking for chips with unlocked multipliers."
 
robble said:
ES samples are sometimes worth gold.

"Being engineering samples, the CPUs were sometimes of a rare type, said the CIB, making them all the more desirable to tinkerers looking for chips with unlocked multipliers."
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Like the westmere dual cores that are 4.4-4.6Ghz out of the box... damn
 
Untitledone said:
Like the westmere dual cores that are 4.4-4.6Ghz out of the box... damn
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the xeon X5698 and other oddball chips? I think that's more a case of "Intel has random chips that only have 2 working cores they want to get rid of for money and sell some to OEMs only" rather than engineering samples. ;) unless they are ES chips.
 
WAHHH HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ES CHIPS NOW???
Not that I ever got any of course ;)
 
if you look below the article

the comments on the page were really funny. One person asks "who buys these, do these devices come with a manual?"

That was my fav
 
Why would you screw up a position in which you probably had free access to all kinds of sweet schwag?
 
Herp and derp, all in one story.

I'm give a testicle to work at Intel doing anything. Hell I'd mop the floors at Intel. Granted, these are apparently not direct Intel employees, and they'll probably just shuffle along to another contractor job, but seriously. Stupid is as stupid does.
 
They probably made more money selling the chips than they made at their jobs.

But, it's one of those things that eventually you will get caught.
 
wow. I did noticed a LOT of ES chips on ebay. Personally, I wouldn't touch an ES chip on ebay as they are usually stolen.
 
i had a q9550 that clocked well and stayed cool. Bought it for dirt cheap from a kid that use to work at intel. Anybody that says you cant sell ES chips hasnt even been too ocforums. They call em extra spicy over there :)
 
mdmikep said:
if you look below the article

the comments on the page were really funny. One person asks "who buys these, do these devices come with a manual?"

That was my fav
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User comments are one of my favorite things about the internet. Usually the really funny ones are intentionally funny, but I'm not sure if this one is. This guy seems to be serious.... lol
 
Yea, it's really bad that they sold ES chips.

"Begins searching Ebay for ES chips."
 
i wish that i had some "extra special" chips for my water-cooling farm
 
I had a an ES chip (E8500) for a couple years, ran ok, but the clocks degraded gradually while I owned it. Problem is by the time those ES chips hit the forums they've been abused by anyone and everyone looking for a fast overclock. I would never buy an ES chip second hand, as who knows what the previous owner/s did to it in the name of performance.
 
Damn no edit...anyways, I knew nothing of ES chips until I got my hands on one. No clue it meant engineering sample. I did dig the fact it said "Intel Confidential" on the heat spreader :p. It wasn't until later I found out that most of them were illegally procured. But by the time I got it, I was the 3rd, if not the 4th owner.
 
Trackr said:
Cause you'd be paying a higher price for a chip that's not as good as the retail one, and would have no way of re-selling it once that retail chip hits the market?
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I can quite easily say that they work just fine running flat out 24/7 and are quite resellable,
 
I really doubt they were yet-to-be-released chips. They were likely pre-release samples sent to OEMs for their internal testing, then disposed of once the chip was actually released.

I have worked at Intel as a contractor a few times (doing jobs that really SHOULD have been 'direct employee' jobs, but such is life at Intel,) and have a decent collection of such CPUs. They get tossed into big 'e-recycle' scrap bins (along with motherboards, memory, cases, etc, etc, etc.) The general philosophy is "don't even THINK about selling them, don't even give them away to non-Intel employees, but otherwise, nobody will pay any attention if you "rescue" things from the recycle bins for personal use." Nearly every current and former Intel employee I know has a "scrap-rescue parts" home PC (or two, or three.) Sometimes the scrap parts are actual retail parts, in which case, you can just dispose of them the conventional way when their life is over - but for the engineering sample parts, the common protocol is to bring them back in to go back in the scrap bins.

I'm just annoyed that I can't put my scrap-rescue computers on my homeowners insurance. (I have enough in computers/parts that it's way more than my insurance would cover in the event of a loss. But since they're engineering sample, they have "no value" to insurance.)
 
Nathan_P said:
I can quite easily say that they work just fine running flat out 24/7 and are quite resellable,
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Yup, I have a dual-socket Nehalem server board running two ES Nehalems (running W-series 130W chips even though the board theoretically only supports 95W X-series or lower chips,) that has been working fine for three years now. Can't speak as to the resell part, of course. (Which is too bad, I have six 'spare' CPUs...)
 
djgizmo said:
wow. I did noticed a LOT of ES chips on ebay. Personally, I wouldn't touch an ES chip on ebay as they are usually stolen.
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Technically *ALL* ES chips would be considered stolen, since Intel only sends them out "on loan", and all ES chips are supposed to be sent back to Intel to be destroyed.
 
lol, I think most of those Extra Spicy chips landed in our [H]orde...
 
They did casualty of $82k I think that IS a bad idea. It's interesting no one noticed it yet.
 
Damn, good luck getting a CPU engineering job in the US. Their only hope now is to go sell their Intel secrets to a Chinese company and work for them.
 
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