Get ready to facepalm, Intel fans. The company’s upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs apparently won’t work with existing stocks of motherboards, a manufacturer confirmed on Wednesday.
In a Twitter post by Asrock last Saturday, the company flat-out said the new CPU won’t work with today’s motherboards.
When asked by Evan Jensen “…will the Z270 Supercarrier get support for the upcoming @intel Coffee Lake CPU’s?” Asrock’s official twitter account, @ASRockInfo replied: “No, Coffee Lake CPU is not compatible with 200-series motherboards.”
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.
PCWorld reached out to Asrock for comment on the tweet but has not heard back. Intel officials declined to comment on the statement by Asrock, saying that it doesn’t comment on future products.
IDG
So was the post just a rogue and uninformed social media post? A hack? Nope.
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.
[Source”cnbc”]
