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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.
Intel, for as long as I remember, needlessly changed sockets.
They're saying not compatible. What this likely means is a change in pin layout.
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.
Actually no, this is probably a sign that a new socket is on the way. This is not news, as Intel has been doing this exact pattern for a while now; Intel will keep a single socket compatible for at least two Core generations before replacing it and breaking compatibility. Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge (1155). Haswell, Broadwell (1150), Skylake, Kaby Lake (1151).
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.
I keep my systems at least 3 years. Although the theory is that you can swap to a better CPU I've only done this one time. Most of the time Intel deliberately continues evolving the sockets, not for any real technical reason AFAIKT, but to keep you buying those motherboards. This is one of the reasons that I don't upgrade processors very often (I skip a few generations) as the gains are small enough that it's just not worth it for the cost and hassle.
That I buy AMD. They tend to at least attempt backwards compatibility and accept that you may ONLY buy a new CPU. Intel wants you to mortgage your house for every Release.... There is a reason you are expected to lose up to 25% market share this year Intel... Stuff like this... Is it.
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.
once more into the breach
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.
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.
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...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I needed to upgrade, and LGA 2011 came out, figured it would be a good platform to go. Then intel moves to V3 and no more cpu upgrades for v1.
So I'm stuck with 2x 2011-v1 systems, but I don't trust intel, and this just proves it.
Coffeelake got shaken up by AMD Ryzen. Intel freaking out is loading more cores on their CPUs as the newer i7s will go from 4 cores 4 threads to 8 cores 16 threads. The newer i5s are rumored to go from 4 cores to 4 to 8 cores with no hyperthreading.
My guess is Intel quickly glued 2 CPUs together like they did with the i9 and now the socket has doubled in size :-)
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Fact is you're probably going to want that new motherboard for all the upgraded ports, memory support, features, etc. that your 4 year old motherboard simply doesn't have.
TFS sounds like a typical conspiracy theory to ascribe greedy intentions to what is more than likely just technological progress.
Given that Intel has abused its industry dominance to first create and then abandon de facto socket standards perhaps two dozen times - who's keeping count now? - over its history, this is hardly a shocking maneuver. Rather it is entirely expected. They like to force people to buy all new hardware sooner rather than later, considering they're collecting royalties for much of it that doesn't have its brand name on it. Back in the Good Olde Days when there were actually other manufacturers competing to populate those same de facto standard sockets, Intel would abandon sockets just to shake up those little guys and drain their resources trying to retool and keep up. Having fully succeeded in eliminating ALL competition for their own de facto socket standards, they now do it just for grins and giggles (and perhaps for those licensing fees).
Exactly. The last time I upgraded a CPU on a mother board was to move from a 25MHz '486 to a 66MHz one. Anything less than 5 years old is fast enough for most cases. Spend the money on an SSD or more RAM.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
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'm still waiting for quad-core Arduino ATmega328P.
#DeleteFacebook
I upgrade for each new generation of memory. I will soon upgrade to a DDR4 based system.
Wait for the new standard to hit price parity, then grab whatever CPU is at the best price/performance point. New faster PCI or whatever, sure. Give me the new fast RAM!
All computing comes down to bandwidth. Memory bandwidth is always the first roadblock. Then disk, and later network.
Yes, about every 4-5 years. Shrug, works for me!
SSD was my only upgrade in about 4 years!
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
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?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They have basically given enthusiasts a reason to look at the competition rather than just dropping in a new CPU upgrade.
Why should Intel care? How many people replace the CPU on their motherboard? Is this even 1% of the market?
my 950 rocks after upgraded to ssd
love is just extroverted narcissism
I do and had built my Skylake with the intention of buying a better CPU down the road, I am an Intel guy through and through but AMD has my attention and might have my next purchase.
Also... "Coffee Lake"? What were they drinking when they came up with... oh. Right.
Why same socket then?
They need to add more pci-e lanes / boost the DMI link speed. Just going to 6 cores at the top end seems like an other kaby lake x joke.
AMD is killing them and AMD has more pci-e lanes at all levels (other then maybe an 4 cpu Intel system that cost will be way higher at least X2 or more then an good amd server system)
IF they added more pci-e in a new socket then it's not so bad more like it's about time they moved off of LGA 1151 / 1150 they are just about the same in number of pci-e lanes / ram channels.
Intel is thrashing around. They've moved from "you want our stuff because it's the best" to, "you're going to buy our stuff because we'll make deals with people you buy computers from". That's not well described, and I'm not an expert (my computing needs are modest) but I've seen this happen before with other tech and non-tech companies. They get big and powerful, and they forget it was willing buyers who made them that way. As far as I'm concerned, you can put me down as a default AMD customer for my next upgrade. I will stay away from Intel until I see some sign that they've remembered the customer comes first. I currently own three computers, two with Intel processors, one with AMD. One I built from components, the other two have been upgraded one way or another...more RAM, SSD drives, better power supply, etc.
It's about time for me to retire the oldest computer and replace my everyday one with something better. Normally, I'd have looked at both AMD and Intel for my upgrade/replacement. Not anymore.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
That probably came off as teaching an old dog - you know all of that stuff - my post was really just addressing the situation of a single fast core running a single thread versus multiple cores - less relevant than it used to be but some stuff still pegs a CPU at 100% leaving the user to wait around and doesn't have another thread when it can.
Now that the average software developer has finally grasped 64 bit and is starting to get a feel for multiple threads that difficult problem will be chipped away at a bit at a time, just as it has been in fields were software developers have had multiple CPUs since the 1990s.
They are building up toward cofefe lake.
Well, you never know. Compare the transition from DDR to DDR2 to DDR3. DDR2 was only current for a very very short time. This reflects in dumpster diving finds: many DDR machines, many DDR3 machines... very very few DDR2 machines. DDR and DDR3 were "current" a very long time, especially DDR3. Everytime a new RAM technology comes around, you never know how long it will last.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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."
Intel just keeps giving me more and more reasons to make sure my next CPU purchase in AMD. Add another one to the pile. Well done, Intel.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's not the the home builder, it's the 'buzz' it creates. If these CPU's work that well, the builders will tell their friends and family to go to BestBuy and pick up a Ryzen. I basically tell all of my extended family what to purchase if not actually build it for them.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
Also, no problems with getting a board that will work with the new CPUs in theory... but is unable to boot up with a new CPU until the BIOS is updated... but how do you update the BIOS if you don't have an older CPU to boot the board and run the update utility?
Happens with intel sockets too. The board I'm using now technically supports ivy bridge but only with a firmware upgrade. The board you buy during the transition could easily be old stock. A decent reseller would know to pick the new stock if you buy a new CPU at the same time, but amazon you get what the computer says to pick.
Intel has always been doing this. However, I'm not so sure the upgrade problem is that much of a problem in real life.
I always build my own PCs and typically go for the best performance-per-euro solution. I have often looked into upgrades, but hardly ever were such impossible-due-to-socket-changes-upgrades really worth it from a performance-per-euro point of view. It's almost always a better idea to save your money and buy a new cpu+ram+mobo combo a year later than to upgrade now.
Upgrading might be interesting if you bought crap in the first place (e.g. Celeron or Pentium) but you should not buy these things to begin with.
I do often upgrade, though, but that's invariably through recombining second hand hardware. Otherwise it's just not worth the trouble.
0x or or snor perron?!
They're saying not compatible. What this likely means is a change in pin layout.
As opposed to AMD's "AM#" motherboard which more or less have compatible pinouts,
and are generally within a firmware upgrade away from supporting next generation's CPUs on previous generation's motherboards (though lacking support for the feature introduced with the newest "AM#" platform).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
My biggest issue w/ Civ6 is how constrained it has been. In previous versions of the game - aside from I & II, you could name your leader, your civilization, your cities. Civ 4 was the best - they had a scenario editor where you could start all the players you wanted in certain spots, preload them w/ whatever units, money, cities & resources you wanted, including renaming anything right from the base game, and then play. In Civ V, there never was a scenario editor: the closest to it was a mod called IGE (in-game editor), which was buggy: if one wants to do True Starting Locations on a map, one can't do that w/ enemy units.
But Civ 6 is even worse. You can't rename your leader, you can't rename your tribe: you have to depend on other people having already released mods, and the Civ 6 people have been horrible about releasing any scenario editors. And a number of the mods are pretty buggy, and won't allow a game to start if they are enabled. As for the length of the game, the way I've gotten around it somewhat has been to play a game up to a point, save, resume another day from that point and so on.
"very very few DDR2 machines"
Well, yea, it was practically impossible to find DDR2 in any size larger than 2GB for desktop systems and laptops, which made any machine running DDR2 effectively garbage for upgrading to modernish-standards since a huge chunk of them only ever shipped with two memory slots on the motherboard.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Intel and AMD don't realize, apparently, that allowing backdoor spyware means the eventual end of their companies.
No, they realise very well, and that there's no other competitor besides them, especially if you go down the Windows route.
Consumers have no other choice, and especially coupled with the fact very few people appear to truly care about their privacy... you only have to look at the countless Android and Google users to realise how little people (even geeks) seem to care!
* I didn't mention Apple, because they are the only major company who appear to care for the privacy of their users and fighting against Gov surveillance.
Intel is likely looking at this in terms of market size, potential income, etc. That's like using only technical analysis (looking exclusively at the random charts trying to find patterns in the noise) for your stock trades.
The people they are talking about are the more technically proficient users among consumers, their perceptions of the superiority of one platform vs another are what drive the decisions everyone else makes and repeats to those who think they are the "technical guy" and it spreads from there... if that consensus lasts for 2-3 years in AMD's favor the consumer market will have shifted by at least 60%. Right now AMD has the technically superior platform both on the consumer side AND the server side (which is a first for them) not only are their chips faster, they are also cheaper. If they can largely maintain that for 3 years, and can at least maintain parity for another 2-4 years beyond that they will have made a similar dent in the server market where the real money is. Intel's methods for calculating TDP result in lower numbers vs average power actually consumed than those of AMD, if AMD picks up on this trick and begins using a comparable TDP calculation Intel will be at serious risk.
That should scare the crap out of intel. AMD has had a massive almost cult-like mindshare among this class of users who remember well when AMD was on top and how much nicer it was to interact with AMD culture than Intel's, this type of user has been silently lurking waiting to pounce on the opportunity to praise AMD again. These are technical users, they haven't denied Intel has ruled the processing platform since the core 2 duo but AMD similarly owned the market while Intel milked higher priced and slower Pentium II/III/IV chips for years counting on their brand and server market clout prior to that. A fundamental AMD architecture revamp that puts them in the lead is just what many have been certain would happen eventually.
P.S. Ignorant people who traded AMD stock down to $2/share with intel at $55/share, the earnings potential was never that significant regardless of the current marketshare of Intel. Analyst look at AMD "growth" to $13-14/share in the past year and freak out about the "bubble", that isn't a bubble, it is a partial market correction recognizing the potential of the brand. Everyone I know making recommendations in the Enterprise space was shocked at that discrepancy and most recognized the opportunity and purchased AMD stock when they saw how underpriced it was before AMD even announced it's new architecture. It was always just a matter of time before AMD released an update ahead of Intel and we all buy the superior technology at purchase time.
P.S.S. We were mining bitcoin with AMD GPUs six years ago... congrats stock market drones on discovering this after mining had already moved on to custom ASICs years before and trading on the news as if it were just happening today.
different socket is okay Only with more pci-e or better DMI. Not just 1152 or 1151B that just locks out the older boards.
"The Builders". How many of us do you think there are? Probably 99%+ of sales are people going to Dell.com or BestBuy and picking something off the shelf. (Well, these days the Apple store, I guess, which further negates processor choice.) I doubt that very many people know the difference between Intel or AMD, other than the fact that Intel advertises, so the name might be vaguely familiar. FFS, I bet not many people actually understand the difference between Intel and IBM for that matter. "They're both computer companies."
And "the builders" are probably dropping in number pretty quickly, as well. I used to upgrade a machine every year or so for about two decades, but I haven't done that in the last 3 years. 3 year old hardware is good enough for just about everything these days. The days of exponential progress every year seem long over. My primary machine is also a laptop, and they're just not worth the hassle to try and build. The massive time-sink to build a laptop isn't worth the upcharge for having someone build it for me.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Hell, even today, 4GB is good enough if your workloads are light. My Ultrabook, granted "already ancient" from 2013, has soldered on 4GB and does just fine. For whatever most people do on their machines 4GB will work. Most of my other machines (DDR3) are at 16GB and I rarely even come close to that usage. Sweet spot seems to be 8GB, which gives you a bit more breathing room than staying at 4GB.
However, base models (go look over at Dell for example) still sport 4GB RAM... Many tablets and surface-like machines are especially guilty, and just like with my Ultrabook, that's soldered on RAM.
I agree that more RAM is better (with diminishing returns), but context does matter. Around the switch from DDR2 to DDR3, 4GB was indeed plenty.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Sorry Intel, but I can't not read that as Coffee Cake CPU.
"The vast majority of new CPU sales are in new systems, and they likely won't be impacted by the incompatibility."
In short; it doesn't actually matter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
intel locked out nvida from making chipsets for intel cpus.
nvidia ion had good video.
and an AMD system at half the cost will have the same power with more pci-e lanes.
AMD next socket change will be for PCI-E 4.0.
also Socket 5 CPU can be placed in a Socket 7 motherboard.
later there was an Super Socket 7 that worked with older cups and new Super Socket 7 cpus would work in Socket 7 boards at lower speeds.
How much of the market is the enthusiast market? If it isn't large, Intel could just ignore them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Also... "Coffee Lake"? What were they drinking when they came up with... oh. Right.
On the lake?
Interesting they seemed to pick a name corresponding to a dried up barren lake bed... Maybe there's probably some sort of subtle subconscious thing going on there...
https://neohouse.vn/du-an/nha-...
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I had coffee laked motherboards 10 years ago, they weren't compatible with anything afterwards, and only made blue smoke.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.