Intel’s Coffee Lake CPUs won't support current motherboards

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The question whether Intel’s Coffee Lake CPU would be supported on existing 200-series motherboards has been around ever since the processor appeared on leaked Intel roadmaps.

Intel’s new Process – Architecture – Optimization (PAO) process made us believe that the company would continue to support newer chips on older platforms. All this changed when a tweet from Asrock recently popped up, saying that this was not the case.

Coffee Lake CPUs are not compatible with today’s motherboards

ASRock confirmed that Coffee Lake CPUs do not support 200 series motherboards. Besides the fact that is based on a tweaked variant of Intel’s 14nm, Coffee Lake’s essential draw is that it will add more cores to Intel’s existing core i7 lineup. Even if this hasn’t been officially confirmed, leaked documents predict a Core i5 part with 6 cores and no Hyper-Threading and a Core i7 with six cores, 12 threads, standard Core i7 branding and dual memory channels.

It looks like the Core i7-8700K will feature a base clock of 3.7GHz, a single core maximum of 4.7GHz, quad-core at 4.4GHz, dual-core max at 4.6GHz, and at an all-core maximum frequency of 4.3GHz.

Even if they still use LGA1151, they will need new motherboards and chipsets to drive them.

AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600X is a 6-core.12-thread behemoth at its $249, therefore, bringing six core chips out of the HEDT market into the upper-mainstream configs makes sense.

Intel needs to release new chipsets

The reasons for which Intel has to release new chipsets range from technical ones to market-based ones. On the other hand, Intel has a long history of releasing chipsets more often than AMD and users also have an equally long history of complaining about this.

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