Not sure how much traction this will get to be honest.
From a marketing perspective this means a new model number, new ads, etc all designed to make last years system obsolete and to bug you into buying the latest and greatest.
However the current generation will add two more extra cores with slightly better single-threaded performance for the same price. i7's and i5's will have 6 physical cores and i3's will have 4 physical cores. On multithreaded performance there is a huge capability increase resulting from the extra cores and threads compared to the latest generation.
Motherboards are yet to be released, and people are expecting higher prices in the beginning due to a potential increased demand. We'll see what happens.
Z270 = Kaby Lake
Z370 = Coffee Lake
Disappointing that those boards won't see the new more cored processors.
There's some... interesting power consumption with the latest i9 OC'ed. https://www.eteknix.com/intel-core-i9-7980xe-extreme-edition...
Sorry Intel, but you slipped up.
The description implies you can drop-in replace a 7700K with something in this series, but apparently not?
Perhaps Intel is banking on the Z370 chipsets being the Intel equivalent of AMD's AM4 -- a chipset that sees support until the introduction of DDR5 memory. Nonetheless, the Z270 chipset being unceremoniously EOL'd is an unpleasant occurrence for many (including ODMs).
To answer your question -- it is most definitely not a drop-in replacement. While they may use the same socket, they are not interchangeable.
I mostly just find it interesting that TSMC seems to have leapfrogged Intel in fabrication processes quite solidly.
> https://ark.intel.com/compare/97129,126684
(only AVX 2.0 is).
