The CPU binning organisation known as Silicon Lottery, is going to shut its doors for good at the end of October. That means no more guaranteed overclocking processors and no more delidding service -- although the latter will run until November 30, at least. The shutdown is for a number of reasons, including pandemic pressures, slow shipments of processors, and a lessened different between commercial chps due to their heavy pre-sale-binning.
With that in mind, the store will be shutting down on October 31.
Silicon Lottery has operated for many years as a way to buy a gold sample processor with a guaranteed overclock. It would take commercial chips from both Intel and AMD, try to overclock them as high as they'll go, and find the point where they hit their peak performance. Then they'd sell them at a nice markup.
But in recent years the ability to eke out a little more performance has waned. Where a few generations ago, a 30% or more clock speed boost was entirely possible under standard air cooling. Even more with water or heftier heatsinks, today, you'd be lucky to get 300MHz. Often merely enabling the same single threaded boost performance across all cores at once. That could have a noticeably impact on performance, but whether it was worth spending several hundred dollars more to get... it's a harder sell.
With a global shortage on slicon, and other pandemic pressures, Silicon Lottery will no longer offer this service moving forward. It has limited stock left of already binned chips, so if you want something from them, buy one before they're gone.
