In the next few days Intel will be releasing its latest generation of processors codenamed Coffee Lake which has been met with mixed reactions from the tech community mostly focused on its abrupt release and the announcement that it will be incompatible with existing LGA1151 motherboard. Motherboards featuring Intel’s new 300-series chipset and the LGA1151v2 socket are also incompatible with older LGA1151 Kaby Lake and Skylake processors.
Intel datasheet for the 8th-gen platform now sheds light on this matter which has been previously cited as just a marketing move to push sales with Intel’s datasheet documenting some significant changes in the pin configuration of the actual processors making it hardware-incompatible with previous sockets/motherboards. In summary, the new LGA1151v2 socket designed for the 8th-gen Coffee Lake processors will have more pins set for power delivery to the CPU cores known as VCC pins. The illustration below will show us that Coffee Lake motherboards will have 146 VCC pins versus Kaby Lake/Skylake who only have 128 pins for this purpose.
It could be inferred that due to the higher power requirements of the increased core count of the 8th-gen Coffee Lake processors from Intel may have required these changes but regardless this is indeed definitive proof that Intel is not just BIOS-locking the new motherboards.
Intel Official 8th-Gen Processor Datasheet
For everyone upgrading to the new Z370 chipset or Coffee Lake processors, we’re once again reiterating that they are not cross-compatible with Kaby Lake/Skylake motherboards and vice versa.
