Intel's Coffee Lake refresh represents the largest performance refresh we've seen from the company since the Sandy Bridge era. While the benefits will primarily impact users who run multi-threaded workloads, many programs these days support four 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, it's a big step forward for Intel customers, but anyone hoping to upgrade a Kaby Lake or Skylake system is out of luck.
As Tom's Hardware details(Opens in a new window), Z370 boards and Coffee Lake CPUs are both incompatible with previous Intel hardware. You can't stick a Kaby Lake or Skylake CPU in a Z370 motherboard, and you can't use a Coffee Lake processor in a Z170 or Z270 motherboard. Intel claims this is due to power requirements on the newer boards, thanks to the additional CPU cores that are now baked in to every chip.
This may be technically true, but it's also a bit of a dodge. Intel lays out its plans and roadmaps years in advance; the first news that the company would launch a six-core Coffee Lake surfaced over a year ago. 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 improve overclocking, but that's only because it didn't build a socket for Skylake and Kaby Lake that could support these features in the first place. AMD has pledged to support original Zen motherboards with upgrades through 2020, which should take us through at least two product refreshes in 2018 and 2019.
The initial run of motherboards for Coffee Lake will be limited to Z370 designs; lower-cost B350 or H370 motherboards will ship next year. Official memory support has been bumped to DDR4-2666, which hopefully means memory will overclock better on the newer chips than the speeds it can hit at present. We've had some trouble with running higher clock speeds on Intel's Core i9-7900X, with one test chip flatly refusing to run DDR4-3200 at full speed. Then again, Threadripper and Ryzen 7 appear to be more sensitive to RAM clocks than Intel's Core i9. Running DDR4-3200 has less of an impact on the Core i9 family than it does on AMD's Ryzen.
The Z370 doesn't offer any new features besides its theoretically improved overclocking and power delivery. The flip side to this is that chipset refreshes don't matter as much as they used to. Fifteen years ago, new chipsets for then cutting-edge CPUs often delivered significant performance boosts, thanks to faster RAM clocks or higher FSBs. That's less common now, and most of the advances we see in motherboard technology involve I/O interconnects like M.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 be compatible with Cannon Lake when Intel's 10nm chip 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 word on whether Coffee Lake CPUs will work in Cannon Lake motherboards or vice-versa.
Now read: Intel Core i9-7980XE review
