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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.
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.
Yes it is known that intel usually changes their sockets, the problem they have now is AMD has finally stepped up to the plate with a competitive if not better product.
If enthusiasts are going to have to replace their motherboard to jump onto intel's latest and greatest you can guarantee that enthusiasts will give AMD a good look over, since they are having to sink money into a whole new motherboard platform no matter which side they go with.
With this new competition Intel would have probably been better off to stick with the same socket for at least one more generation, that way they could capture the market that doesn't want to buy a whole new motherboard.
They have basically given enthusiasts a reason to look at the competition rather than just dropping in a new CPU upgrade.
No. When I upgrade, I get a new motherboard and CPU. And often, new memory for the MB. I have built systems for maybe 25 years, and I don't remember doing a simple CPU upgrade. But I did swap out a Cyrix CPU because it kept crashing Win95.
A dingo ate my sig...
We are in a bad bad timeline for hardcore and even regular PC enthusiasts, the technological leaps have stagnated significantly, where people with 7 year old PCs need only double their memory and add an SSD (if they didn't already have one) and almost all tasks are fast enough.
The delay in shift from 14nm to 10nm has been pretty bad across the industry, in fact considering the performance improvements for processors, GPUs over the past 7 years, it seems quite apparent that the manufacturing process still plays a very heavy part in the performance boost between generations, just as much as architectural design of the processor.
I have a fairly specific use case, similar but not quite the same to gamers (I want a ridiculously fast PC for general use, I'm an extreme browser, exceeding 100-400 tabs at a time, but I don't game anymore, so I like mid to small ITX, quiet, professional looking machines)
I almost always have open from 8 to 25 applications open of varying kinds. I really like a very responsive system at sub $5000 expense (a 64gb, quad channel, DDR4 4000 machine with 12 cores, liquid cooled, would be great, but the cost would be insane and honestly, a complete top of the line, but not HEDT machine would likely do what I need at easily 30 to 50% savings)
Unfortunately Intel is all over the place with product varieties, when you look around the Intel ARK site (the new one is awful, great job web developers, great job, another unecessary redesign) you can see just how many processors they make, from 6w to 150w across all kinds of segments.
Sadly the days of a "preemo desktop" CPU being their primary bread and butter is over and that's why we see ridiculous things like this article is stating, they are diversified everywhere and the complexity seems beneficial to their bottom dollar.
The rumor is the coffee lake 6 core desktop processor won't work in the existing z170/270 chipset, despite the fact it's basically the same family as the last 2 CPUs for those boards (i7-6700 / i7-7700 etc) just 2 more cores 'glued on'
We also don't know if this new processor was ever intended to come out at 14nm or it was originally 10nm.
There's talk that the new chipset, Z370 isn't even any more than a re-badge of the z270! Which makes forcing people to use it even more ridiculous.
There's a "z390" (?) is a cannonlake chipset or "PCH" - and it's coming out next year - but that chipset is only for cannonlake processors, except there are (apparently) none of those planned for desktop.
So, do you buy an i7-8700k now and put it on a z370, knowing that you might be missing out on some new features in 2018, like bluetooth 5 and wifi ac being built into the chipset itself?
The whole thing is messy and awkward to follow, it's only gotten worse the past few years.
Honestly, I think the best thing to do, if you're capable is to stop reading the news about this stuff and just buy what's best when you need a new machine. It's endlessly time consuming and confusing to be an educated consumer with PC stuff. (I should know, I've wasted possibly years of my life googling / reading this rubbish since I first started building my own machines 20 years ago)
But the long and short of it is, stuff just isn't improving at a fantastic rate anymore. Even if you're silly rich, you can't buy a machine that utterly decimates other machines easily. People can get 60 to 80% of your performance for 1/4 or less.
I've built systems for about that long and I did a simple CPU upgrade about 2 years ago. About 6 years ago I built a dual Xeon E5645 workstation for myself ($500 per CPU at build time) and two years ago I upgraded them to Xeon X5690 CPUs. The X5690 CPUs were about $2000 each when I built the machine but only $200 each used on eBay 4 years later. I've also piecemeal upgraded a bunch of other parts like RAM, disks, etc.
The end result is a 6 year old workstation with shockingly good performance when compared to anything but a new $5000k workstation. I recently got the upgrade bug and decided to use the Phoronix Test Suite to test the performance of my workstation against modern i7 and Xeon chips. The new i7 chips were definitely much faster at single core tasks but, my old school Dual Xeon X5690, with 4xRAID5 SATA*2* SSDs and 96GB of RAM, handily crushed them for any task I care about: Compilation times, multi-core number crunching, etc.
My point is that if you buy cheap and shitty consumer grade hardware, you can expect to throw it away after a few years. If you buy low end professional/enterprise hardware, and that suits your needs, you have a cheap and easy upgrade path.
Why should Intel care? How many people replace the CPU on their motherboard? Is this even 1% of the market?
Intel should care not because of the home builders. Intel should care because of the big box builders.
..'cept now they can't... they have to RAISE their prices in order to screw down these latest more expensive motherboards.
Those older motherboards have come down in price over their period of compatibility, meaning that even big name system builders could offer lower prices.
"His name was James Damore."