Intel's Upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs Won't Work With Today's Motherboards (pcworld.com)

Intel's upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs won't work with existing 200-series motherboards that support Kaby Lake, a manufacturer confirmed on Wednesday. In a Twitter post by Asrock last Saturday, the company confirmed the news when asked if "the Z270 Supercarrier [will] get support for the upcoming @intel Coffee Lake CPUs." Their response: "No, Coffee Lake CPU is not compatible with 200-series motherboards." PCWorld reports: According to at least one reliable source outside of Intel, the new Coffee Lake CPU will indeed not be compatible with Z270 boards, even though the chipsets with the upcoming Z370 appear to be the same, PCWorld was told. The source added that there are hopes in the industry that Intel will change its mind on compatibility. Tomshardware.com said it had independently confirmed the news with Asrock officials as well.

Why this matters: The vast majority of new CPU sales are in new systems, and they likely won't be impacted by the incompatibility. However, there's also a very large and very vocal crowd of builders and upgraders who still swap out older, slower CPUs for newer, faster CPUs to maximize their investment. An upgrade-in-place doesn't sell an Intel chipset, but it at least keeps them on the Intel platform. If consumers are forced to dump an existing Z270 motherboard for a newer Z370 to get a six-core Coffee Lake CPU, Intel risks driving them into the arms of AMD and its Ryzen CPUs.

Comments

Why is this news?

[sinij]

Intel, for as long as I remember, needlessly changed sockets.

Re:Why is this news?

[cheesybagel]

No shit. They do this *all* the time.

Is anyone surprised?

[rahvin112]

For the last 10 years since Intel gained complete monopoly control over Intel chipsets for Intel CPU's they go out of their way to make minor changes to force new motherboards to feed their income from chipsets. They add a pin or two or make some other minor change that makes it impossible to use new cpus with older montherboards even if the chipset is identical in features.

This is SOP at Intel these days. Use that Monopoly power to extract maximum revenue. Hell the new Platinum Xeon chips have MSRP's of up to $13,000. Something that would not be possible with legitimate competition.

Upgrading CPUs?

[kugeln]

Do people really "upgrade" processors? I mean, I've been building computers for almost 20 years now and I think I got over the whole idea of upgrading the processor after the first time, circa 1997.

Outside of the gimmicky super-shredder-killer-fps-man-slayer motherboards, it's not like they have been the most expensive part of a computer build for a long time. Introducing a new video card incompatibility like the transition from PCI -> AGP -> PCI Express would be a whole different story.

they're trying to help AMD

[deathguppie]

I'ts been a long time since AMD has released a competitive product. Intel in a show of appreciation and friendship has decided that the best way to help them along is to assure that unlike the new series of ryzen processors coming out theirs will not be backwards compatible with the hardware you buy. Why else would they restrict the pcie lanes in their top of the line chips by price and lock out features unless they were trying to help AMD along.

AMD

[c horde]

I was waiting for this CPU, but I might as well make the migration to AMD now if I'm having to buy a new motherboard. Intel needs to get their act together, their pissing their customers off.

Already switched to AMD

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I've already switched to AMD Ryzen CPUs for new systems because they're fast, cheap and stable. Not sure why I'd use Intel for anything here on out; instead I can spend more on video cards and larger SSD storage.

Re:Already switched to AMD

[Dutch Gun]

As a professional game developer, I can assure you that videogames are the exact opposite of an "embarrassingly parallel" problem. There's a LOT more to videogames than graphical processing: AI, pathfinding, physics, audio, resource and memory management, animation, world updates / occlusion systems, etc. These are all CPU-intensive subsystems, and many of them are inherently bound to global data (a virtual world simulation), which makes it extremely tricky to split off into independent threads (probably the only exception being audio).

That means that each subsystem in the game must be carefully and painstakingly optimized for threaded performance. It's not possible to trivially split up all these subsystems by thread either. Many of these systems tend to interact with each other and the global world database, and that means the gains tend to be smallish and non-scalable in nature.

Generally speaking, it's an extremely difficult problem, and one which I don't think the industry has really cracked yet. Believe me, if it were trivial to do, we've have done it a long time ago.

Not a big deal?

[Kjella]

Intel has hardly ever had usable CPU upgrade on the same motherboard, generally they have kept compatibility for two consecutive generations. It's only like one year in between and has probably been for the OEMs' sake not the consumers. Maybe that's up to two years now that they've switched from tick-tock to process-architecture-optimization, but in any case the year-over-year improvements has been minimal so why? If you so desperately want to replace last year's Z270+CPU, sell them as a package deal and buy a new Z370+CPU combo. Though if you're doing it for the six-core, do yourself a favor and buy a Ryzen or if you must buy Intel then an X299. Doing it just for the two extra cores is stupid. Except for the fanbois who'll take any chance to trash talk the opposing team, is there anyone here who'll stand up and say they'll miss this upgrade path? I expect crickets...

Re:They probably will work.

[gl4ss]

if it's a different socket, okay.

but " Z270 boards, even though the chipsets with the upcoming Z370 appear to be the same" .. that matters a few years down the line when you're building a kit from some parts. if the socket is different then it's not that much of a problem.

a more interesting thing would be just.. is it faster in any sort of meaningful way?