Hiya, hope this is a fitting qustion for this community.
So recently made a purchase from a second hand market. I just wanted the case that the computer I bought used, but got the full computer with all its parts However when I removed the cooler and cleaned off the remaining paste I saw this CPU was marked as Intel Confidential.
Frankly I've got no idea what this means, was this CPU used for Intel Internal only and somehow ended up in the wild? Did it belong to some third party company? How do I know what generation the CPU is? (Guessing some software will be able to tell me this). Are these normal to find second hand?
If anyone knows anything regarding this strange occurrence - please let me know 😅
I used to work at a games studio that would get these delivered fairly regularly, usually paired with a particular motherboard and presumably a custom BIOS.
I think we were technically supposed to return them but the manufacturers never enforced it, so once the chip was actually released to the public - and assuming the sample was stable enough for general use - the PC would rotate into normal stock and eventually get sold for cheap to staff or end up in the spare parts bin.
While it was cool at first to get pre-production chips before anyone else, it became pretty mundane and I'm not at all surprised to see them out in the wild decades later. Interesting piece of history though!