Thanks to a leaked Intel Launch Update document we now know that Intel is planning to launch a slew of new 300-series chipsets early next year. Reportedly vetted by Gamer's Nexus, the leaked roadmap mentions H310, H370, and B360 on the consumer side, Q370 and Q360 for the business market. There is also a tease of a Z390 chipset that is set to replace Z370 as the high-end motherboard platform of choice.
As if things were not already confusing enough in the _370 chipset space (with Intel's Z370 and AMD's X370), Intel plans to add a H370 chipset to the mix which should be a bit cheaper and have less overclocking, PCI-E slots, and M.2 ports. Intel has also had to tweak the name for its B series chipset to B360 as well so as to not confuse itself with AMD's B350 chipset offering. Finally, there will be a H310 chipset for budget options. These three consumer chipsets are slated for launch in Q1 2018.
For its business customers, Intel plans to launch Q370 and Q360 chipsets in Q2 2018.
Finally, Intel is rumored to launch a Z390 chipset sometime in the second half of next year (2H 2018). According to Gamer's Nexus, industry sources have indicated that Z370 is more of a "stop gap" solution that Intel used to quickly roll out its Coffee Lake processors. Z370 is intended to only support Coffee Lake and while engineering boards were able to support Kaby Lake-R and Coffee Lake CPUs, this functionality has been disabled in firmware. Z370 based motherboards reportedly have tweaked PCB trace optimizations and power delivery needed to support the new processors. Z390 meanwhile will be the successor to Z370 in 2018 and will offically support the entire range of consumer level Coffee Lake processors as well as rumored 8 core (16 thread) processors of undetermined architecture (maybe 14nm++ Coffee Lake but would be a rather big but not unheard of die at ~176mm^2 so rumors also speculate that these 8 core parts could be based on 10nm Ice Lake instead).
Beyond the existence of these chipsets, the ILU did not go into details on the features they would offer or things like price points for motherboards based on them, naturally. As usual you should take these types of leaks with a teaspoon of salt, but it is interesting that Intel may be stepping up their game in rolling out new products faster and moving more cores to the mainstream chips–finally!
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Will the 8700k work on a
Will the 8700k work on a z390? I’m probably getting a z370(or h370)+8700k in a couple weeks, however, id like to replace the mobo if z390 comes with pcie4 and usb 3.2.. will it be possible?
All signs point to yes. Two
All signs point to yes. Two CPU gens per socket has been the norm for Intel since before even Sandy Bridge.
Can’t say for sure yet as
Can't say for sure yet as these are just rumors but my guess is that yes, you should be able to use the i7 8700K or other existing Coffee Lake CPUs on Z390, but you might not be able to use the 8 core chips on Z370 if that makes sense (Z390 boards might have beefier power traces and phases). I'm guessing once Z390 is out, it will replace Z370 and you won't really see new boards though you'll probably still be able to get H and Q370s. We'll just have to wait and see though!
It really feels like Intel is
It really feels like Intel is just saying.. AMD have more money.
Decisions like this make people want to switch to a platform that could last longer.
If anyone today would be asking me what to get, I’d say Intel 7700K for gaming, and AMD 1800X/1700X for productivity (in the regular segment)
High end, TR 1950x. Or if you have a lot of money and every second of render counts then Intels top dog, or dual Epyc setup.
The mess above just shows that Intel has no idea what it is doing. The High end Desptop will have a quad core dual channel CPU… WHY? Intel, get your shit together..
Breaking backwards compatibility… WHY? (Ok, money…) but you’re rising that people will turn to the competition as their sockets have backing from AND for forward compatibility…
Intel obviously wasn’t
Intel obviously wasn’t planning on shipping a 6-core mainstream part until very recently, probably right around the Ryzen launch, so they had to break compatibility or risk having the 6-core parts not function properly in a lot of boards. If they had made the power/thermal specifications higher, then the boards would have cost more (lower margins).
In its early development
In its early development stages, Intel had the i7-8700k working perfectly on some Z270 and Z170 boards. The problem is: not all the motherboard manufacturers spent enough back then to lay out their traces for memory and power delivery to be any better than what was required at the time on those older chipsets for the budget SKUs. So the challenge was either 1) make ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, Supermicro, etc. do the work to re-validate their past products and then inform the consumers which ones can handle the DDR-2666 and whatever voltage specs for the 8th gen CPUs and push BIOS updates to those products that they’ve all already spent the money from instead of selling new products, and then during the press for Coffee Lake say “it will work on /some/ 100- and 200- series boards, but not others… because confusion” or option 2) just make the break with a new platform that will also support the future gen of chips and save the compatibility headache for everyone along the distribution and service line. The fallout of this “easy way out” by Intel, which is really just business as usual for them by having 2 CPU gens per platform, is internet commenters racing to tell a tale about the unimaginable greed of one company verses another company.
I would still make that same recommendation to someone, I would even add that the extra cores of the 8700k make it decent for some productivity along with gaming if you can afford to spend a bit more on the motherboard over an equivalent Ryzen one. Yes, the X299 i7 and i5 chip are lol, but the HEDT has always been a niche-market kind of joke in my opinion, like a muscle-bound body builder who can’t do much but look good in a photo or forum signature.
Maybe if we hold our breath and Intel isn’t looking, one of the companies who’s older boards could handle the 6-core in testing will “release” a BIOS to support it.. like ASRock maybe… Who knows!