Intel Coffee Lake Pin Diagram Confirms Power Delivery Changes

In the lead-up to the launch of its 8th-gen Core processors later this week, Intel has dealt with a lot of flack for the fact that its brand-new Coffee Lake processors will not be compatible with outgoing motherboards. On the surface, it’s easy to understand that ire, because after all, Coffee Lake is built on an LGA1151 design just like Kaby Lake and Skylake. But thanks to one dedicated member on 3DCenter‘s forums, we get some proof that the severed backwards compatibility was in fact justified.

Well, that’s depending on how you see things, really. Some might still believe that Intel deliberately changed a few things to warrant this change, but let’s be honest: Intel gains nothing (or little) from doing this. I can’t see the company deliberately upsetting its partners which still have a lot of stock of last gen Intel motherboards. That doesn’t mean Intel is perfect in all of this, though: it’s pretty poor that the Z270 chipset is being replaced less than a year after it came out. Intel’s planning of things could have been better, but perhaps like most of the world, it totally underestimated the wrench AMD was to throw in its gears.

So how did Chrisch come to these conclusions? He perused data sheets for the 8th-gen chips, and then mapped out the pins as they’d be arranged on the processor. If this sounds tedious, it definitely is, so cheers to Chrisch for going through the effort.

It’s impossible to appreciate the differences when there is no second image to show those differences, but unless you care to see it yourself, you’re not really going to need to scrutinize. The original images can be found on the forum thread, but a word of warning: the host’s ad situation is asinine.

Ultimately, many of the reserved pins found on the previous generation now have power delivery contacts in their place. As a non-engineer, I wouldn’t think that alone would matter, but other points show slight differences and rearrangements, which would definitely result in oddness on last-gen motherboards (is it even right to call them last-gen?).

We have some 8th-gen Core chips in-house, and we’ll deliver a review soon after launch (more-accurate-but-still-questionable-in-accuracy, next week).