The Chinese second-hand market is full of surprises and unreleased hardware. The Goofish platform is where one can find upcoming Intel Core and AMD Ryzen CPUs on sale early. Those are often early engineering samples that may lack full functionality, but occasionally, one can find qualification samples that are almost as good as what is coming to the market later. It looks like someone is now selling AMD’s unreleased EPYC Genoa-X processor, which is part of the updated Zen4-based data-center series with 3D V-Cache. These processors do not even have a release date yet.
The alleged sample on sale is the EPYC 9684X, and it is ‘almost new’ and it is working. This particular SKU offers 96 cores and 1152 MB of L3 Cache and there is only one available in stock. Of course, in this case, stock is from one of the AMD partners who had no permission to sell this CPU in the first place, but neither AMD nor Intel are particularly active in taking such a listing down. Furthermore, since the seller posted the full QR code, AMD can easily track who received this particular sample. AMD Genoa-X is a successor to Milan-X (Zen3) optimized for technical computing and databases, so where the extended L3 cache benefits the most. Officially, the CPU series are to be released this year, but thus far, AMD made no mention of the exact release date.
