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With a new generation of Intel processors usually comes a new platform. Intel’s 8th Gen Core chips are no different, even if it’s too early to assume which members of the 8th Gen family the new motherboard chipset will align with.

For now, it’s the six new desktop processors that are the first to be based on the Coffee Lake architecture. The new chipset they’re getting is the Z370. Indeed, the Z370 is more a requirement than a gift. Officially, the new Coffee Lake CPUs will not run in older motherboards.

In some ways, that’s frustrating. In most regards, the new Z370 is identical to the old Z270. It has the same broad connectivity, so we’re talking up to 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes, six SATA 6Gb/s ports, with support for RAID 0/1/5/10, a total of 14 USB ports, with up to 10 in USB 3.0 spec (yup, still no native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2), and support for Intel’s Optane memory as a boot drive. In fact, our understanding is that it’s the same chipset, just under a new name.

The difference—or rather the reason, according to Intel, for requiring a new chipset and therefore preventing drop-in upgrades of older boards with the new Coffee Lake processors—comes down to power consumption. The new six-core models are said to guzzle more juice than the old 200 Series mobos can handle.

That’s the theory. In practice, it seems as though it might just turn out that some high-spec Z270 motherboards could end up supporting Coffee Lake. According to Asus, some Z270 boards have sufficient power delivery to support Coffee Lake processors. All that would be needed are updates to the Management Engine and BIOS. However, this is something that Intel would have to enable. Motherboard makers would not be able to make that move unilaterally.