Intel Z370 Chipset Could Support Kaby Lake, But Intel Will Not Allow It

[Deleted member 93354]

Shintel and co could just admit that Intel are cocks, maybe just juan time? But no, Intel dindu nuffin as always guys!
Many of us remember the 775 days.

Keep clawing away at your enthusiast userbase, Intel. It will come back to bite you when the geeks who work at large companies stop recommending your stuff. Enthusiasts, while a small part of the market monetarily, are often a large driving force in IT and acquisition departments. The perception seems to carry through to to higher levels when there are not payouts and bribes from Intel, especially when AMD has a competing or superior product available.

I know I just got approval for a TR build machine for mega compile we have to do several times a day.

That was my recommendation.

 

[Trimlock]

*click bait title

*unconfirmed sources

*rumors

yup, reasons to hate Intel is for shitty journalism.

 

[KarsusTG]

My next couple of builds will be AMD. Even if they don't have the best core to core performance, it's still more than acceptable and AMD has been better than Intel for multicore stuff for a long time. Excluding the xeon line of course, servers are their own bear.

If anything, I would like to support AMD just so Intel has some competition and doesn't completely lock down the monopoly.

 

[N4CR]

I know I just got approval for a TR build machine for mega compile we have to do several times a day.

That was my recommendation.

Well there you have it folks - proof is in the pudding.
Bean counters will love you too, what do you mean it's within 10-15% of the Intel option that costs over twice as much?
A recommendation that makes total business sense. You could almost build two TR rigs for the price of one Intel rig that's marginally better.. you want productivity - that's god damn productivity. One employee with 10-15% faster times, or two with 10-15% slower for almost the same cost as one 10-15% faster. No brainer.
I'd hire you

 

[cyberguyz]

Entirely possible, but could you please educate me on what that is?

It's a new chipset with no functionality changes other than it supports a new CPU revision. If you are not running that CPU revision, why would you be upset you can't buy it?

Now to be clear, I totally understand the inverse issue - that people want to plug the new CPU in their existing motherboard and system. The value proposition of that is clear. While I work on the other side and know there's always more to it than is publicly stated in terms of why they can't support old CPUs - I still sympathize with the end user there.

I do not understand why anyone with a KBL would want to run a 370 whose entire reason to exist is solely to support the new processors. If you don't have enough money to upgrade both at once, then save your money and upgrade when you do. Or don't - but spending money for no increased functionality is at least on the surface a questionable plan.

Sorry for the snark in the previous post, I was doing a failed attempt at levity.

It's called incremental upgrading. Upgrade the motherboard 1st, then down the road when you scrape some cash together get the nice 6-corfe processor to pop into it. As already stated here a few times, not everyone has the $$$ to plop down all at once on a big-bang upgrade. Most muggles have to save up for the bits and pieces. Why not buy the motherboard 1st and use it while saving up for the chip? Intel seems to forgotten the importance of that to the enthusiast world quite a long time ago. AMD on the other hand gotr the memo that says that in order to to sell [a lot of] products, it has to enable the ability to step up incrementally so people can afford it.

 

[Dan_D]

We already had reason to believe that Z370 was nothing more than a re-badge of Z270. Thus the chipset could always support Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. What is / was not known is whether or not the VRD spec changes and VRM implementation could support the earlier CPU's. It seems likely given that Coffee Lake isn't that different than the earlier chips, but adding more cores brought that line of thinking into question.

This is a guess on my part, but putting a Kaby Lake CPU into a Z370 motherboard and being able to reach POST code 26 does not mean that the compatibility is artificially blocked. The lock up could be for any number of other reasons. An electrical engineer or semiconductor engineer would be able to offer something more definitive, but when you feed electronics the wrong signals, too much power, not enough power, etc. shit goes wrong in all kinds of ways.

That said, I wouldn't put it past Intel to artificially limit Coffee Lake to Z370 chipsets for it's own reasons which aren't technical in the slightest. For example: Bootable RAID arrays with VROC require Intel brand SSDs on X299, you need a hardware license key that's sold separately to use all VROC's features. Here is another example: You have to buy the $1,000 CPU just to get 44 PCIe lanes on the CPU. So an artificial limit is hardly a stretch.

 

[KenRico]

This hastens obsolescence also - like the phone mfg with integrated batts instead of removal .

If I have a 7700k and want to do a mb change in the future because it flaked or want smaller -- that chipset may not be shipping and now forced to buy cpu to go with mainboard .

When I heard that Kaby Lake was WIN10 only ..started shopping Devils Canyon and mini itx board and there were no boards ..but lots of cpus . Luckily Ryzen hit and got my last NON win 10 upgrade done .

Kenny

 

[Trimlock]

When I heard that Kaby Lake was WIN10 only ..started shopping Devils Canyon and mini itx board and there were no boards ..but lots of cpus . Luckily Ryzen hit and got my last NON win 10 upgrade done .

Kenny

Wut...?

 

[Deleted member 93354]

This hastens obsolescence also - like the phone mfg with integrated batts instead of removal .

If I have a 7700k and want to do a mb change in the future because it flaked or want smaller -- that chipset may not be shipping and now forced to buy cpu to go with mainboard .

When I heard that Kaby Lake was WIN10 only ..started shopping Devils Canyon and mini itx board and there were no boards ..but lots of cpus . Luckily Ryzen hit and got my last NON win 10 upgrade done .

Kenny

Windows 7 doesn't support Ryzen either unless you disable the specific windows update #'s that turn off support intentionally. It's Microsoft's way of forcing you to windows 10.

 

[OutOfPhase]

We already had reason to believe that Z370 was nothing more than a re-badge of Z270. Thus the chipset could always support Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. What is / was not known is whether or not the VRD spec changes and VRM implementation could support the earlier CPU's. It seems likely given that Coffee Lake isn't that different than the earlier chips, but adding more cores brought that line of thinking into question.

This is a guess on my part, but putting a Kaby Lake CPU into a Z370 motherboard and being able to reach POST code 26 does not mean that the compatibility is artificially blocked. The lock up could be for any number of other reasons. An electrical engineer or semiconductor engineer would be able to offer something more definitive, but when you feed electronics the wrong signals, too much power, not enough power, etc. shit goes wrong in all kinds of ways.

That said, I wouldn't put it past Intel to artificially limit Coffee Lake to Z370 chipsets for it's own reasons which aren't technical in the slightest. For example: Bootable RAID arrays with VROC require Intel brand SSDs on X299, you need a hardware license key that's sold separately to use all VROC's features. Here is another example: You have to buy the $1,000 CPU just to get 44 PCIe lanes on the CPU. So an artificial limit is hardly a stretch.

My personal educated guess is there is a timing issue which causes trouble with the new chips. It's probably a "bug", and as such would never be called out as the reason why you can't upgrade. People would be mad. Madder than they are.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

My personal educated guess is there is a timing issue which causes trouble with the new chips. It's probably a "bug", and as such would never be called out as the reason why you can't upgrade. People would be mad. Madder than they are.

Timing issues can generally be fixed with micro code and uefi/bios updates similar to how old motherboards as taught to recognize chips as they come out. The Z68 could be upgraded to support Ivy Bridge even though they had different voltages and PCIe communication rates than Sandy Bridge.

I'm inclined to think this is intentional if the pinout and voltage lines are the same.

 

[OutOfPhase]

Timing issues can generally be fixed with micro code and uefi/bios updates similar to how old motherboards as taught to recognize chips as they come out. The Z68 could be upgraded to support Ivy Bridge even though they had different voltages and PCIe communication rates than Sandy Bridge.

It really depends upon the specific case. There are cases where you simply cannot make the chipset complete something as fast as you'd optimally want, as not everything is field programmable. You are faced with adding wait states or saying it is incompatible. I think Intel would prefer the latter in this case.

 

[Dan_D]

My point is that, simply throwing a Kaby Lake processor and getting a partial POST does not mean that Z370 Express based motherboards are in any way compatible with Coffee Lake, or that the limitation is strictly artificial. Again, I wouldn't put it past Intel to do that, but I don't think the above scenario is concrete proof that Z370 works with older Kaby Lake CPUs.