Intel’s product roadmap pointed to the release of the company’s optimized Kaby Lake products sometime in 2016, but so far they haven’t shown up. According to Colorful, however, Kaby Lake motherboards may arrive this fall.
Specifically, Colorful plans to release it Z270 motherboards sometime in October. The company couldn't tell us when Kaby Lake CPUs would come out, though, and it's possible that we will see Kaby Lake motherboards show up on the market before the corresponding processors.
Kaby Lake should continue to use Intel’s LGA 1151 socket, which was introduced with Skylake. Because they use the same socket, all Kaby Lake chipsets should support Skylake processors, as well. This creates a market for Kaby Lake motherboards prior to the release of Kaby Lake processors, and could result in the boards showing up before the CPUs. Essentially the same thing occurred with Haswell and the Z97 Broadwell chipsets a few years ago.
Intel’s CEO said the company is already shipping Kaby Lake samples to its OEM partners. We also heard from ECS that it plans to ship a Kaby Lake notebook sometime in December.
We need to take all of this with a grain of salt, however, as Colorful made it clear that Intel could postpone the release of Colorful’s Kaby Lake motherboards. If no delay occurs, however, it seems likely we will see Kaby Lake motherboards this fall.
