I thought manufacturers would be more happy as people also need to buy the mainboard :)

Agreed, I doubt OEM's are pissed. Now they have an excuse to upsell the customer. I imagine the decision to move on or stay with a socket or firmware lock is 50% technical and 50% commercial for Intel. They need to keep OEMs happy and sales flowing. They don't want to just sell CPUs and have end users pop-in new CPUs and lose the support and goodwill of OEMs with mb's and systems to sell.

From a marketing perspective this means a new model number, new ads, etc all designed to make last years system obsolete and to bug you into buying the latest and greatest.

I bet theyre pissed. If it was compatible, people would buy more boards they already designed, now they have to create and manufacture new boards that compete with old stock. Likely, due to AMD some OEMs are having trouble selling intel chipsets in that socket size

Many people have upgraded to either Kaby Lake or Ryzen. There are rumors that Intel aims people who have not upgraded for more than 5+ years.

However the current generation will add two more extra cores with slightly better single-threaded performance for the same price. i7's and i5's will have 6 physical cores and i3's will have 4 physical cores. On multithreaded performance there is a huge capability increase resulting from the extra cores and threads compared to the latest generation.

Motherboards are yet to be released, and people are expecting higher prices in the beginning due to a potential increased demand. We'll see what happens.

They use the same physical socket (LGA1151) but are restricting usage via firmware / chipset.

Z270 = Kaby Lake

Z370 = Coffee Lake

Z170 boards supported Skylake and Kaby Lake(with firmware updates).

Disappointing that those boards won't see the new more cored processors.

There's some... interesting power consumption with the latest i9 OC'ed. https://www.eteknix.com/intel-core-i9-7980xe-extreme-edition...

I miss the days when there was actual competition with chipsets. Intel seems way too keen to put harsh restrictions on their chipsets for anything but their most overpriced chips, especially W.R.T. PCIe lanes and ECC support.

Officially, Z170 won't see Coffee Lake. Unofficially... Let's just say it's possible.

Is there some proof you could share? Motherboard manufacturers have been super silent about this.

Sorry, not really, I've only heard rumours (from a reliable source though). It should be technically possible because coffee lake CPUs were demoed on previous chipsets. I doubt you are going to hear much from the motherboard manufacturers, they're probably more or less obliged to push the Z370. I understood the unofficial part as in not publicly available, at least not right away.

One of the many things that influenced my decision to build with AMD Ryzen.

Sorry Intel, but you slipped up.

Is it some kind of LGA1151v2? They are really not communicating this very well.

The description implies you can drop-in replace a 7700K with something in this series, but apparently not?

LGA1151 has some significant limitations (eg: PCIe and memory bandwidth), I am certain that Intel did not make this decision lightly. Z370 are quite different from Z270 and this will cause confusion for many.

Perhaps Intel is banking on the Z370 chipsets being the Intel equivalent of AMD's AM4 -- a chipset that sees support until the introduction of DDR5 memory. Nonetheless, the Z270 chipset being unceremoniously EOL'd is an unpleasant occurrence for many (including ODMs).

To answer your question -- it is most definitely not a drop-in replacement. While they may use the same socket, they are not interchangeable.

> Perhaps Intel is banking on the Z370 chipsets being the Intel equivalent of AMD's AM4 -- a chipset that sees support until the introduction of DDR5 memory.

Hah, you wish. It's already been leaked [1] that next year's 8 core desktop CPUs will require a yet another chipset - the Z390.

[1] https://www.custompcreview.com/news/intel-chipset-roadmap-re...

Well then, this is troublesome.

Hopefully AMD's next-gen chipsets (ie: the AM4 4xx chipsets) maintain backwards compatibility with current-gen CPUs.

While AMD has been straight-forward about current-gen chipsets (ie: the AM4 3xx chipsets, A320/B350/X370) supporting all manner of AM4-compatible CPUs until AM4 is EOL'd, it is not yet clear whether next-gen AM4 motherboards will support current-gen CPUs. Probably not.