What exactly is changed in BIOS that support Kaby Lake?

BIOS/UEFI Modding
1

Hi guys, I have a 1151 Skylake ES CPU (QJR9) and general knowledge about ES as follows:

  • ES CPU only runs on 100 series chipsets and on old BIOS that not yet have KabyLake support added. It will not work on recent BIOS or 200/300 chipsets. If you put it on something that is not stated above, it will not boot.

But I wonder if anyone study what exactly “Kaby Lake support” is apart from microcode and how exactly ES CPUs are not compatible with new BIOSes. I am using old bios and I don’t really care, but having able to mod any bios for Skylake ES support as well as mod any bios for Kabylake support will greatly extend lifespan of many computers.

2

@villi Hi and welcome to the Win-RAID forum.

This CPU also has the high-end Iris Pro 580 iGPU which has 72 EUs (Execution Units).

The Kaby Lake high-end Iris Plus iGPU 640 and 650 only have 48 EUs so the motherboards were designed and built for this spec.

My guess is that Intel changed something crucial with the power delivery for Kaby Lake.