Over the last couple of months, there have been whispers surrounding an additional Intel chipset and new CPU coming out to follow-up Coffee Lake and Z370. Now today, the first Z390 motherboard seems to have made an appearance online, presumably set to launch alongside the rumored ‘Coffee Lake-S' processors early next year.
As reported by Videocardz, a roadmap did leak recently showing Coffee Lake-S for early 2018. This will include new six, four and two core processors with TDPs between 65W and 35W. One of these mysterious six core CPUs was spotted on the Sisoft database recently, accompanied by a Z390 motherboard.
Previously a Eurocom representative also stated that the Z390 chipset will support 8-core processors too, so we could see Coffee Lake S expand further beyond what is currently being reported. In this leak specifically, we can see a 6C/12T processor, so 8C/16T might not be arriving just yet, but the chipset seems to be capable of more.
Right now, the Ryzen Zen+ refresh is expected in 2018, so Z390 and Coffee Lake S may be planned as direct competition to that. Meanwhile the Coffee Lake processors we saw released last month were intended to combat the current iteration of Ryzen.
KitGuru Says: This is all still rumor territory for the time being, but it seems that AMD's rise in the CPU market this year has kicked Intel into gear. Intel appears to be working on getting new CPUs out at a much faster rate now. With all of these leaks already falling into place, it looks like 2018 is going to be very interesting.
i9 mainstream Intel chip on the way?
Do you think it will be backwards compatible with the z370 boards?
Cheap unlocked parts!
i think mother z390 will be the first with i9 for mainstream
I was hoping that if this was a 2H release, Intel maybe would give us lce Lake cpus, but no, it looks like Skylake refreshed again. How many times will Intel sell us the same thing over again? Come Intel, give us Ice lake already! Oh well, looks like I’m waiting for the Z470 platform, but it will be worth it.
No chance, none! Why would Intel do that? Doesn’t make any business sense. Also, that would completely kill off Basin Falls! Intel spent a fortune to develop Basin Falls just to kill it off less than a year after releasing it????! No way.
Nice joke
Almost certainly. Intel generally does 2 generations per chipset. The changes to the power delivery pins on the socket do seem to be intended for the 8 core chips.