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CoffeeLakeFeature

Intel'due south Coffee Lake refresh represents the largest performance refresh we've seen from the company since the Sandy Bridge era. While the benefits will primarily bear on users who run multi-threaded workloads, many programs these days back up 4 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, information technology'southward a big step frontward for Intel customers, but anyone hoping to upgrade a Kaby Lake or Skylake system is out of luck.

Every bit Tom's Hardware details, Z370 boards and Coffee Lake CPUs are both incompatible with previous Intel hardware. You lot can't stick a Kaby Lake or Skylake CPU in a Z370 motherboard, and you tin can't utilize a Coffee Lake processor in a Z170 or Z270 motherboard. Intel claims this is due to power requirements on the newer boards, thank you to the boosted CPU cores that are now baked in to every chip.

This may exist technically true, but information technology'south also a bit of a dodge. Intel lays out its plans and roadmaps years in accelerate; the beginning news that the visitor would launch a half dozen-core Coffee Lake surfaced over a twelvemonth agone. 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 meliorate overclocking, merely that's just because it didn't build a socket for Skylake and Kaby Lake that could back up these features in the first identify. AMD has pledged to back up original Zen motherboards with upgrades through 2022, which should take united states of america through at least two product refreshes in 2022 and 2022.

The initial run of motherboards for Coffee Lake will be express to Z370 designs; lower-toll B350 or H370 motherboards will ship next year. Official memory support has been bumped to DDR4-2666, which hopefully ways retentiveness will overclock improve on the newer fries than the speeds information technology can hit at present. We've had some problem with running college clock speeds on Intel'due south Core i9-7900X, with one test chip flatly refusing to run DDR4-3200 at full speed. And so again, Threadripper and Ryzen 7 appear to be more than sensitive to RAM clocks than Intel'south Core i9. Running DDR4-3200 has less of an touch on the Core i9 family than it does on AMD's Ryzen.

The Z370 doesn't offer whatsoever new features besides its theoretically improved overclocking and power delivery. The flip side to this is that chipset refreshes don't matter equally much as they used to. Fifteen years ago, new chipsets for then cut-border CPUs often delivered meaning performance boosts, cheers to faster RAM clocks or higher FSBs. That'south less common now, and most of the advances we see in motherboard applied science involve I/O interconnects similar 1000.2, USB 3.0 Gen 2, or specialized storage that connects via a modified DRAM slot.

We also don't know if Coffee Lake CPUs or motherboards will exist compatible with Cannon Lake when Intel'due south 10nm flake ships for desktops at some point in the future. There are rumors that the Cannon Lake refresh could include eight-core desktop CPUs and a new Z390 motherboard platform, but there's no discussion on whether Coffee Lake CPUs will work in Cannon Lake motherboards or vice-versa.

Now read: Intel Core i9-7980XE review