The guys over at Hardware.Info have grabbed an early Intel Coffee Lake CPU pattern and examined the backwards compatibility of the chips with Z270 boards, and have confirmed that they don’t play good. But possibly that’s not the tip of the story.
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So, which motherboard vendor goes to be the primary one to create a hacky little BIOS replace to permit Coffee Lake CPUs to drop into their present 200-series boards? Someone on the market have to be engaged on it as a result of, from the appears of issues, there isn’t any bodily distinction between the LGA 1151 socket used for Kaby Lake and the LGA 1151 socket in place for Coffee Lake.
It’s unlikely to be a member of the tier one motherboard crew – Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus – as a result of they most likely do not need to threat upsetting the chip large, however there are a bunch of smaller producers who would profit from the publicity and goodwill such a characteristic would generate.
It may additionally generate a good chunk of additional gross sales too, as a result of in keeping with the chipset transition roadmap we’re not going to be seeing decrease spec 300-series boards till subsequent yr. If one of many board producers can get a current-gen H270 or B250 board to run with a Coffee Lake six-core Okay-series i5, and even the brand new quad-core i3, they might clear up within the worth finish of the gaming market this yr.
By all accounts the limitation is one thing to do with the Intel Management Engine (ME) code baked into the previous few generations of Core processors. The ME code is there to supply firms with quick access to distant system administration in a company atmosphere, however there’s some type of incompatibility between the brand new ME code within the Coffee Lake CPUs and that used with Kaby Lake.
Essentially all of it means, at launch, you will not be capable of merely purchase a brand new Coffee Lake chip and simply drop it into your present rig. Which is greater than just a little disappointing.
The Hardware.Info crew have proven that the incompatibility works each methods, with Kaby Lake chips not responding when dropped into Z370 motherboards both. This isn’t essentially an uncommon scenario, and will nicely simply imply the Z370 wants a BIOS replace to supply assist, however it is also one other symptom of the ME limiting CPU compatibility.
The ME code is tightly managed by Intel, with stories stating that no-one exterior of Intel has entry to it, but when the motherboard producers can discover a method round it they might doubtlessly present a future BIOS replace to permit the Coffee Lake processors to operate in a 200-series motherboard. When board makers have circumvented a processor producer’s system necessities previously, nonetheless, such because the unlocking of dormant AMD CPU cores of their Phenom II vary, new microcode has been launched to nullify the characteristic.
Because of the locked-down nature of Intel’s ME it might show not possible for the board makers, however there will certainly be some engineers beavering away proper now to present it a shot.
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