It feels like when you learn that Ticketmaster also owns most of the scalping services and your chance of getting a good ticket is zero unless you're willing to go to the scalpers.
Basically the good stuff is reserved for the rich because they are rich.
>It feels like when you learn that Ticketmaster also owns most of the scalping services and your chance of getting a good ticket is zero unless you're willing to go to the scalpers.
If anything, this situation is better than Ticketmaster's, because at least the producers are getting the money. With Ticketmaster, they're pocketing all the money and the performers are getting nothing. If Intel isn't binning these, a third party (probably someone affiliated with an OEM) would be doing this and pocketing the difference.
>Basically the good stuff is reserved for the rich because they are rich.
Are you also upset that you can't get luxury goods for cheap because they're "reserved" for the rich?
It's (a little bit) scummy, because they're selling them on auction, which has a decent chance of flogging them for orders of magnitude more than they'd ordinarily sell them for, with the added bonus that they don't have to honor any warranty stuff since they're going to be clocked to hell.
> It's (a little bit) scummy, because they're selling them on auction, which has a decent chance of flogging them for orders of magnitude more than they'd ordinarily sell them for,
It seems to me that demand is far higher than supply, thus the auction ensures that those who really want them will have a realistic shot of getting one. That's far better than having to resort to buying them from price-gouging scalpers.
Buying them at inflated prices from Intel rewards Intel for being able to make these at all. If they were able to make more of them, they'd be rewarded more.
Paying the inflated prices to scalpers would reward scalpers for hogging the supply. That would be far worse. If I'm going to pay an inflated price for something, I'd rather use it to reward the person making it than some speculator trying to wrench some profit out of a tight market.
> Buying it at inflated prices from Intel effectively rewards them for their inability to produce more.
For this assertion to make any sense you'd need to believe that they don't benefit by increasing sales of a product line, particularly when they increase prices.
Hardly, since the "rejects" will just be sold as the regular model(s).
In the old "lottery" system the rejects would end up on the secondary market, making Intel's final revenue effectively the same as if extreme overclocking wasn't a thing.
Nobody is forced to take part in the auction. There are other CPUs that can be chosen from. If an auction participant calculates it pays for them to buy these even an inflated prices they are not really ripped off, it's just free market.
Also, binning of CPUs is a fact of life. CPUs don't all come the same from the production line. It allows you to buy bit less capable CPU for much cheaper if you wish so which, I would assume, you didn't take into consideration when you posted your thoughts.
I don't see the auction itself as scummy. They're absolutely free to do that. It might be a bit scummy that the auction isn't open to everybody. Only a select group of OEM vendors will have access to this. That may also mean it's harder to acquire for benchmark tests.
Furthermore, no warranty could even mean they can get away with selling processors that won't work reliably at the listed speeds. If they were to do that, that'd definitely be scummy.
Basically the good stuff is reserved for the rich because they are rich.