An anonymous seller from the eBay auctions has sold an engineering sample of Intel code-named Conroe processor, which, according to certain sources, should be officially released only in July, this year. It is unclear who could be the first buyer of a processor, which is not officially supported by available mainboards.

The chip that was sold by the seller who called himself sciences_art and was located in Malaysia, operated at 1.86GHz clock-speed, 1066MHz processor system bus and contained 2MB of unified L2 cache. The processors code-named Conroe will be supported by mainboards based on Intel 965 and Intel 963 chipsets as well as future versions of motherboards powered by Intel 975X core-logic. Currently available mainboards are not projected to support the Conroe.

The Conroe E6300 chip, which official price in 1000-unit quantities is expected to be around $210, was finally sold for $600, probably to a computer enthusiast seeking for an opportunity to “play” with the forthcoming chip ahead of the whole world.

Intel’s processors code-named Conroe, Merom and Woodcrest will utilize a new micro-architecture with shorter pipeline and high performance per clock ratio. The new processors will feature 14-stages pipeline, down from 31 or more stages found in current Intel Pentium (Prescott) designs, 4-issue out-of-order execution engine as well as improved performance of the floating-point unit (FPU). Also, the new chips and platforms on their base will also feature capabilities like virtualization, LaGrande technology, x86-64 in addition to EDB, EIST and iAMT2.

Officials for Intel did not comment for the news-story.