Question Who is the most powerful person in Intel/AMD/Nvidia who gets to play with the best hardware?

[igor_kavinski]

We all know that they bin their chips. They likely find gems in the process that are too good to sell at normal consumer prices. Who gets to own these highly overclockable priceless chips with the best frequency/power characteristics? The CTO? Or do the engineers smuggle them out and sell them on the black market?

 

[SAAA]

Weren't some high end Nehalem or Westmere parts used by high frequency traders? They had like 1GHz factory overclock over best consumer parts so definitely binned.

Yeah, here they are

I don't know what else might require that performance regardlless of price even today... maybe some pro gamers in the e-sports field?

 

[igor_kavinski]

These are rare chips that got sold. What about the ones that are so rare that the company doesn't want to sell them because the asking price would make them unaffordable to everyone except millionaires? Do they go to employee of the year? Or to high profile company executives? Or even to board members?

 

[Doug S]

Binning would not identify a "one in a million" chip that outperforms the other 999,999. They don't determine the maximum frequency / lowest power each individual one is capable of. Look what "binning" implies, they need enough chips at whatever the top bin is to make it worthwhile offering that SKU.

I had assumed it is possible they have "superbins" that aren't on the price list for really small numbers of golden chips if someone like Wall Street HFT guys was willing to pay some insane markup above the highest listed SKU, sounds like that is the case. If someone approaches them with a big enough sack full of cash, something that wasn't worthwhile the day before suddenly becomes worthwhile tomorrow.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Does Intel make them sign an NDA? One would think that such chips would end up on eBay when they are past their prime.

 

[nicalandia]

These are rare chips that got sold. What about the ones that are so rare that the company doesn't want to sell them because the asking price would make them unaffordable to everyone except millionaires? Do they go to employee of the year? Or to high profile company executives? Or even to board members?

They sell them at closed online auction. Der8uer got a 14-core Core i9-9990XE that clocks Super High,

 

[uzzi38]

Weren't some high end Nehalem or Westmere parts used by high frequency traders? They had like 1GHz factory overclock over best consumer parts so definitely binned.

Yeah, here they are

I don't know what else might require that performance regardlless of price even today... maybe some pro gamers in the e-sports field?

Yeah and more recently the 9990XE.

The Intel Core i9-9990XE Review: All 14 Cores at 5.0 GHz

www.anandtech.com