PCHardCores: Coffee Lake Not Supported by Intel’s 200-Series Motherboards

Wednesday, 2 August 2017

Coffee Lake Not Supported by Intel’s 200-Series Motherboards

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In a stunning bit of Twitter, the ASRock Twitter feed @ASRockInfo has stated that Coffee Lake, Intel’s 8^th Generation Core processors, will not be supported on the current generation of 200-series motherboards.

No，Coffee Lake CPU is not compatibilble with 200 series motherboards.
— ASRock (@ASRockInfo) July 31, 2017

Information like this is usually kept under wraps until an Intel reveal, but it seems to have been mindlessly posted to Twitter by @ASRockInfo on July 31st, an account that last tweeted on April 11^th before this tweet occurred.

At this point, due to the similar microarchitecture to Kaby Lake being used in Coffee Lake, most of the technology press were under the impression that the Coffee Lake processors would be compatible with LGA1151 socket motherboards, namely the 100-series and 200-series. With the above tweet essentially confirming that Coffee Lake will not be supported, it means that either the new CPUs will not be LGA1151, or that the motherboards will lock-out the processors by firmware, or the CPUs and sockets will use a different notching system to ensure the wrong processor cannot be put in the wrong board. It does mean however that 200-series users hoping to upgrade to a Coffee Lake processor (which early reports are suggesting might be up to six cores, but this has not been announced) will not be able to.

There are many potential reasons for the change if the socket is still LGA1151. The obvious one would be product segmentation on Intel’s part, which would stick in the craw for a number of the user base. The second one that it might actually be a physical requirement for the processor – if previously unused pins are required for power and/or control for different elements of the DVFS in the chip. This would depend on new features on the chip, which could extend to different power management, different graphics, or different IP blocks that require separate pin-out connections. Intel might also be using a different power system for voltage regulators, which might not be compatible with current 200-series motherboards.

At this point, nothing has been made official. The fact that this was stated on Twitter so far from any launch date that we know of is an interesting development.

Gallery: Coffee Lake Not Supported by Intel’s 200-Series Motherboards