Its one of those cases where the information is just about viable enough to talk about now. There have been faked things like this before, CPUs with custom engraved IHS' and the like.
TBH, Intel should do this for the PR stunt value alone, show everybody that they are still the kings of clock speeds. It wouldn't be too difficult for Intel to assemble a bunch of well binned i7 8700K samples.
Intel needs to draw attention away from AMD in whatever way they can.