What just happened? With Intel's Alder Lake CPUs on the horizon, packaging for most of the lineup has just been revealed, and the Core i9-12900K's box looks particularly interesting. We're also seeing what are allegedly engineering samples of the chips already up for sale on Chinese websites.

Photos of Intel’s 12th-gen processor packaging, which comes courtesy of Videocardz, show that the majority of the lineup uses similar designs seen in older generations. The Core-i3 packaging is yet to be revealed, hinting that the line will be released at a later date.

The exception is the Core i9-12900K. The packaging for Intel’s next flagship is striking—larger than the other SKUs, and with what appears to be a replica of a wafer inside the box as part of its design.

We recently heard that Intel was experimenting with new stock cooler designs for Alder Lake. It could be that the size of the Core i9-12900K suggests it will include a boxed CPU cooler, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Elsewhere, Twitter user @yuuki_ans posted that someone is selling engineering samples of the Alder Lake Core-i9 12900K on Chinese online shopping platform Taobao, which is owned by Alibaba. They’re going for 4,500 Yen, or $700. That's quite a lot when you consider there are no motherboards available to plug them into, making the CPUs pretty useless. The link to the chips’ page is now dead, so they’ve either been removed, sold, or maybe this was a fake.

Intel is set to officially announce the Alder Lake chips at its Innovation event on October 28. Retailers can take pre-orders straight after the announcement, with shipping set for November 4.