For support of new CPUs Intel will have to pay for support of old

Intel recently introduced the new Cascade Lake-X generation HEDT processors. Technically, they have changed little, but they have become half the price of their predecessors, which made them much more attractive to potential buyers.

The processors retained the performance of LGA 2066 and compatibility with existing motherboards based on the X299 chipset, which is logical. However, there is a nuance.

Intel issued a small warning saying that older motherboards need a BIOS update to work with the new CPUs, which is also logical. Only the update that will bring Cascade Lake-X support to such boards will remove Kaby Lake-X support.

Recall, the Kaby Lake-X line consists of only two processors: Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X. They appeared simultaneously with the Skylake-X CPU back in 2017 and were an extremely strange proposition. The fact is that these processors were no different from regular Core i5 and Core i7. They had four cores, a dual-channel memory controller, and the Core i5-7640X did not support Hyper-Threading at all. It is not surprising that such CPUs were not particularly popular, but still removing their support looks strange. True, perhaps this is not a marketing issue at all, but the size of the BIOS chip. In addition, this does not matter for users, since when buying a new CPU, support for the old one is hardly useful.