Gigabyte confirms Intel 9000-series CPUs will work on existing motherboards

Rumors about Intel’s 9000-series desktop processors have been making the rounds for more than a month now, yet Intel has not revealed a single official teaser or piece of information about the gen 9 CPUs. MSI and Gigabyte already announced support for the upcoming unannounced Intel Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K, Core i5-9600K, and Core i5-9400 that are supposed to be launched in October 2018, and it looked like these new processors would only work on the new Z390 motherboards.

Gigabyte recently cleared things up in an official press release, claiming that its current Z370 / H370 / B360 / H310 motherboards will get updated BIOS versions that support the gen 9 CPUs later this year. Previous leaks revealed that the i9-9900K is going to feature 8 core and 16 threads, so analysts were a bit skeptic about how current motherboards would handle increased TDPs for 2 additional cores. It turns out that Intel designed the gen 8 motherboards to handle a maximum of 8 cores after all.

Intel’s gen 9 CPUs should go head to head with AMD Ryzen 2000-series that is already available and outperforming the current i7-8700K mainstream flagship. Meanwhile, AMD will soon release the new Theradripper 2000-series and steal some HEDT CPU market shares from Intel.

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