Thanks to the rumored info offered by some purported leaks, it looks like Intel's product stack might get even more complicated. A user over on Chinese hardware site PCEva posted up some legitimate-looking Intel slides that dole a dram of data on the blue team's upcoming Coffee Lake processors. The headlining info is that Intel's next desktop CPUs, codenamed "Coffee Lake," will apparently not work in existing LGA 1151 motherboards despite slotting into LGA 1151 sockets. Have the salt shaker handy.
The news about socket compatibility seemed to be confirmed by ASRock on Twitter, although the surprisingly frank tweet has since been removed. You can see it archived for posterity here. The deletion would seem to cast doubt on that bit of data, but Tom's Hardware confirmed the news with ASRock separately. If we believe the slides from PCEva, Coffee Lake-ready motherboards will use the Intel 300-series PCH, known as the Kaby Lake Refresh platform.
That's right, Kaby Lake Refresh (KBL-R). The purported slides go on to claim that Coffee Lake-S will comprise six models at launch, so it's possible that Intel is planning to fill out the rest of its line with refreshed Kaby Lake CPUs. According to the slides, those CFL-S chips will be available in Q4 this year, and the full CFL-S launch should happen in Q1 of 2018 alongside a separate "Cannon Lake PCH." Even more confusingly, the info seems to indicate that this so-called Cannon Lake PCH will also be part of the 300-series chipset family.
There's other interesting tidbits of news in the post, too. Assuming this information is real, the top Coffee Lake-S CPU will be the Core i7-8700K, packing six cores running at 3.7 GHz base clock and 4.7 Ghz turbo—all within a 95W TDP. These chips will supposedly have 802.11ac Wave 2 and Bluetooth 5 support built into them, although making use of that connectivity will apparently require a Cannon Lake-platform motherboard. The slides also seem to indicate that Intel supposedly has no plans to update its X299 platform or launch new CPUs for it through the first half of 2018.
There's still a possibility that ASRock was speaking out of turn, of course. Likewise, it's also possible that this info just isn't real. Let us know what you think in the comments.