The only Ivy Bridge chips that are out are engineering samples. It's good that people are bringing it up, but this is likely just a beta thing. Maybe they wanted to be able to remove the IHS...or maybe they didn't want people to know the final overclocked performance characteristics for some reason.
What does engineering sample mean? I could go to Microcenter right now and buy a Core i5 3570K right now if I wanted to. Are they selling engineering samples? That seems like a somewhat shady move.
The first Ivy Bridge consumer chips are just hitting retailers today (NewEgg just put them on sale ten hours ago). All of the experiments done so far have been on review chips sent out some weeks ago.
It means pre-production, or beta. No, Microcenter is not selling engineering samples..the production chips _just_ became available. I suspect we'll see a new round of testing today/tomorrow that'll hopefully shed more light on this.
