It’s already common knowledge that Intel's upcoming 8th generation Coffee Lake series of CPUs is going to use the socket LGA 1151, leaving many to wonder if Coffee Lake would be backwards compatible with Intel's 100-series and 200-series, such as Intel Z170 and Z270 motherboards.



Intel has mentioned on several occasions that Coffee Lake won’t work on 100-series and 200-series of motherboards, although the company has never officially given a reason. Intel has now released their "8th Gen (S-platform) Intel Processor Family Datasheet", which reveals more information on the upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs. The data includes a long PDF that shows up why existing LGA 1151 motherboards are not compatible.

According to the data sheets, on Coffee Lake CPUs there are more pins responsible for delivering the main power to the CPU cores (VCC points). The current Kaby Lake and Skylake CPUs come with 128 pins while Coffee Lake requires 146 pins. Anyway we believe that is quite strange that they all have identical alignment notches, allowing inexperienced builders to make several mistakes.




Source: Techpowerup