From ExtremeTech: Intel’s Coffee Lake refresh represents the largest performance refresh we’ve seen from the company since the Sandy Bridge era. While the benefits will primarily impact users who run multi-threaded workloads, many programs these days support four or more threads. Even when applications aren’t multi-threaded, having more cores can keep a system running smoothly when multiple single-threaded applications are running. All in all, it’s a big step forward for Intel customers, but anyone hoping to upgrade a Kaby Lake or Skylake system is out of luck.
As Tom’s Hardware details, Z370 boards and Coffee Lake CPUs are both incompatible with previous Intel hardware. You can’t stick a Kaby Lake or Skylake CPU in a Z370 motherboard, and you can’t use a Coffee Lake processor in a Z170 or Z270 motherboard. Intel claims this is due to power requirements on the newer boards, thanks to the additional CPU cores that are now baked in to every chip.
This may be technically true, but it’s also a bit of a dodge. Intel lays out its plans and roadmaps years in advance; the first news that the company would launch a six-core Coffee Lake surfaced over a year ago. Intel may be telling the truth when it says it had to build a new socket for Coffee Lake to deal with power requirements and improve overclocking, but that’s only because it didn’t build a socket for Skylake and Kaby Lake that could support these features in the first place. AMD has pledged to support original Zen motherboards with upgrades through 2020, which should take us through at least two product refreshes in 2018 and 2019.
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