If the prospective $400 price point of Intel's Anniversary Edition Core i7-8086 CPU seems a little exorbitant considering it's just a binned 8700K with a bumped clock speed, then how about getting one for free? All you have to do is sign up to the new Intel competition and you'll be in with a chance of winning.
Intel has been a company for a long long time. You might assume that it started its journey on the road to CPU dominance with the first Pentium CPU back in the early-90s, but it's been around far longer than that. Intel began back in the late 60s producing RAM-based products, but it was in the creation of its 8086 CPU in 1978, that it really started to make an impact on the computing industry.
The 8086 was the first x86 CPU ever produced and it acted as a herald of what was to come. To celebrate that turning point in Intel's history, this month, as part of its 40th-year anniversary, Intel debuted the 8086 Anniversary Edition processor. It is said to be capable of hitting 5GHz across all cores when boosted right out of the box and offers six cores and 12 threads.
Better yet, Intel is also giving away 8,086 of these chips and you can win one. All you have to do is pop your email address and territory into the official competition page and you'll be in with a chance. This is open for the next few hours only though, so get in their first. Winners will be announced on June 11, with chips set to be delivered in October.
While there are more than 8,000 chips up for grabs though, they are allocated to many different regions around the world. The U.S has the larges number, with 2,000 chips available, with 2,000 more sent to China, 1,000 to Germany and then 500 more to Canada, France, the UK, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
