In just a few days Intel will be launching their 8th Generation Core “Coffee Lake” processors. One of the main things people have been upset about when it comes to these processors is that they are not compatible with current 200-series motherboards even though the socket size is the same. Well Intel has released data sheets for these processors with images of the socket’s layout and they do support Intel’s statement that Coffee Lake indeed will not be compatible with current motherboards.
Coffee Lake CPUs actually have more pins, specifically more pins responsible for delivering the main power for the CPU cores, known as VCC pins. In the first image below you see Coffee Lake has 146 VCC pins compared to the 128 pins on Kaby Lake in the second image.
So this does confirm that Coffee Lake CPUs are hardware-incompatible with current generation motherboards and the ability to use them cannot be unlocked via a BIOS update.
