Intel will make the Skylake and Kaby Lake motherboards compatible with the new Coffee Lake processors with a simple BIOS update as they share the same socket.

Little by little, news is being revealed regarding Intel's Coffee Lake processors, which are designed for desktop and gaming computers. The first thing we have learned is that an apparently Intel i5 processor has been leaked, which would have six cores and six processing threads, which will work at a frequency of 3.5GHz. As we know Coffee Lake will arrive with the LGA 1151 socket and as we already imagined, it could be compatible with motherboards with Intel 100 Series and Intel 200 Series chipsets, or what is the same, motherboards for Skylake and Kaby Lake.

Simply for these motherboards prior to Coffee Lake with the same socket, we will need a BIOS update that will make them compatible, however, as with the Kaby Lake in Skylake cards, some functionalities would be lost, such as the PCIe lines that Kaby Lake supports which are not compatible with Skylake and Intel Optane support, which is only supported on Kaby Lake motherboards. This allows the user to have a high-performance processor without the need to invest in a new motherboard, which can be very interesting.

The information has been provided by SiSoftware Sandra who verifies that this Coffee Lake processor would have been tested on a Kaby Lake motherboard, therefore we would talk about engineering tests at this time to optimize the BIOS of the Kaby Lake and Skylake motherboards, thinking of the Coffee Lake. The problem is that the technical performance difference of 15% would not justify the change, although it can be said that going from four to six cores should offer something more than a simple 15% improvement in performance, but we will see that when are displayed to the public.