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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'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'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
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.
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).
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 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?
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.
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."
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