Gigabyte is readying its B760 and H610 motherboards for new LGA1700 processors. Wait, what year is it?"Built on socket LGA1700 and expected to launch in early 2027," Gigabyte says in a post on its website, "the new processors bring fresh performance to an established platform, and Gigabyte users can be ready from day one."These are new LGA1700 chips. We're talking about fresh spins on Raptor Lake and Arrow Lake here, which previously made up the 12th/13th/14th Gen, and were last released as a major launch in 2023. That's a long time ago in CPU land. We've had two consecutive launches since, in Arrow Lake and the Arrow Lake refresh, neither of which dented AMD's stranglehold on the enthusiast market with its X3D chips. So what chance do these old chips have of selling anything? Quite a good one, actually, as these old chips still support DDR4 memory.DDR4 memory is currently a lot cheaper than DDR5 memory. We've seen big price hikes on both, but you can grab a DDR4-3600 32 GB kit for around $210 and a DDR5-6000 32 GB kit for $480. Ouch.Back in August, Intel VP and GM for enthusiast channel, Robert Hallock, confirmed that Raptor Lake chips would stick around in Intel's portfolio for "years to come". He specifically notes DDR4 support as to why:"LGA1700 is still a good socket. Lots of people [are] still interested in DDR4, so [we’ll] keep offering, and you'll see [pricing] smooth out over time. It'll come back to normal. That's the plan."(Image credit: Future)So, older, cheaper chips that support older, cheaper memory sticks. That's the plan, and I get why Intel is doing it. It is uniquely placed to offer an upgrade path between memory generations with its chips. What I mean by that is, these older chips have a memory controller that supports both DDR4 and DDR5, depending on the motherboard one buys. As Gigabyte notes, "With Gigabyte's latest BIOS, owners of existing B760 and H610 motherboards, DDR5 and DDR4 models alike, can step up to upcoming processors in three simple moves: download the BIOS, update, and drop in the new CPU. There's no board replacement, no system rebuild, and no complicated setup. Just a fresh wave of performance, delivered through the platform you already trust and love."In theory, one could actually upgrade from DDR4 to DDR5 with a new motherboard and one of these chips, though DDR4 is just fine for gaming, so that's not going to amount to much performance gain. Rather, I'd hope to see more cores and performance at lower price tags from these coming chips, in turn offering a great drop-in upgrade for anyone with an older chip that can't afford the large leap to a whole new system right now.