Check out this ultra-rare unreleased Pentium 4 engineering sample CPU clocked at 4.0GHz

A rare engineering sample of the Intel Pentium 4 years turned up on social media, clocked at 4.0GHz on CPU-Z as an Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 980.

Check out this ultra-rare unreleased Pentium 4 engineering sample CPU clocked at 4.0GHz
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Gaming Editor
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TL;DR: An ultra-rare Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 980 engineering sample, clocked at 4.0GHz, surfaced on Reddit, sparking interest as a possible employee loaner chip. This unreleased NetBurst architecture processor highlights Intel's shift to Core 2 series for better performance-per-watt amid AMD competition.

An ultra-rare engineering sample of an unreleased Pentium 4 has hit the internet, with a purported Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 980 clocked at 4.0GHz turning up on Reddit. Check it out:

Check out this ultra-rare unreleased Pentium 4 engineering sample CPU clocked at 4.0GHz 12
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Reddit user diegunguyman is the owner of the purported Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 980 processor, sharing some images of the ES chip both on the front, and back.

The Redditor posted on multiple subreddits to try and get an answer at what he was looking at, as he explained: "the only text on the CPU itself was written in Sharpie, just the model number and clock speed, 4GHz". There was no official documentation to reference, so the Redditor posted on r/pcmasterrace and r/Intel looking for answers.

He got some replies from Redditors that were interested in his story, with the theory that the chip he had being a loaner CPU provided to an Intel Employee at the time. The Employee Loaner Chips from Intel are even more rare than Engineering Samples (ES), but according to a purported Intel "insider" on Reddit, that after extensive layoffs at Intel, policing the loaner system is no longer happening.

We never got to see the finished Intel NetBurst architecture, as the company moved into the Core 2 series which was built on top of a mobile-first Core architecture. Intel shifted many more things after that, with the retirement of the NetBurst architecture. In 2006, Intel was pushing more performance-per-watt tuned processors, to try and stop what was coming out of AMD in the form of the Athlon 64 and dual-core Athlon X2 series processors at the time.