Intel pushes motherboard makers to drop DDR4 support from 700 series motherboards

pcgamer.com:

It’s being reported that Intel wishes for its next generation 700 series motherboards to transition to DDR5 support only. 700 series boards will be released alongside 13th Gen Raptor Lake series processors, which is said to be happening in Q3 of this year.

TechPowerUp reports that Intel is pushing motherboard makers to drop support for DDR4 memory, even though Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to retain DDR4 support. If you don’t want to shell out big money for DDR5, thankfully Raptor Lake is expected to be compatible with existing 600 series motherboards with DDR4 or DDR5 support. That's particularly useful for owners of high end DDR4 kits that lose very little, if anything in performance compared to higher latency DDR5 kits.

If next gen motherboards do drop DDR4 support, it wouldn’t be very surprising. The industry rapidly moved from DDR3 to DDR4 and as long as pricing and availability is reasonable, there’s little reason to continue DDR4 support. 

Even without this news we would expect Z790 boards to support DDR5 only, but the situation with cheaper chipsets could be murkier. DDR5 will need price parity with DDR4 or cost just a little more if it’s to penetrate the lower end of the market. If DDR5 continues to carry a price premium, it will certainly slow the adoption rate of systems with B and H series chipsets. Users will be more likely to hold off an upgrade until DDR5 prices entice users to make the switch.

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Retaining DDR4 support for 12th Gen systems was a great move in hindsight.  DDR5 was completely unavailable at the time of its launch and forcing users to adopt DDR5 only would have slowed the adoption of 12th Gen