Why Coffee Lake cannot work on Z270

Then why use LGA 1151 to begin with? 

Now, this is where we move away from fact and into the realms of rumour. Intel has never gone on record to say why they have used LGA 1151 or what their future plans are, though there have been a few leaks and a lot of online chatter about Intel’s future plans. 

What many people are saying is that Coffee Lake is a rushed launch, with Intel accelerating their release plans by a quarter of a year to deliver better competition for AMD’s high-end Ryzen CPU lineup. This is allegedly why Intel utilised their existing LGA 1151 socket, using a baseline that already exists and modifying it to support CPUs with higher core/thread counts. 

This also goes some of the way to explain why Z370 is so similar to Z270 in terms of platform/motherboard features and why it is releasing less than a year after Kaby Lake, though it is unlikely that we will ever receive confirmation about this one way or another.   

In the rumour mill, there are countless stories about what is coming next for Intel, be it the promise of a newer Z390 chipset, 8-core Coffee Lake CPUs or even another new socket. So far nothing has been confirmed and it is unlikely that anything new will be coming from Intel until at least the second half of 2018, aside from the release of lower-end 300-series chipsets and CPUs. 

Coffee Lake represents a huge change from Intel’s older desktop CPUs, though at the same time they are remarkably similar. This will be the 3rd CPU generation that uses Intel’s Skylake CPU architecture, though it is also the first time that Intel has brought six-core CPUs onto a mainstream platform. 

Intel’s Coffee Lake series of CPU will release on October 5th, so expect more Coffee related content on OC3D soon. Right now we have several Z370 motherboard previews for you to look at in the meantime, which includes a quick look at ASUS’s MITX Z370-I.

 
You can join the discussion on why Intel’s Coffee Lake CPU’s cannot work on Z270 motherboards on the OC3D Forums.