Today, new information has surfaced that contradicts even MILD’s claims. This new report comes from Benchlife suggesting that there will be, in fact, a new socket for Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, but it won’t be the LGA 2551 as reported by MILD. Instead, LGA 1851 is going to be the CPU socket for Intel’s future desktop processors. Perhaps, the 2551-pin LGA socket is meant for BGA designs, and this new 1851-pin solution is strictly for consumer desktop motherboards. Benchlife says that LGA 2551 socket is not listed anywhere in Intel’s product planning for desktop series, which further confirms that socket is not meant for desktop processors. All that being said, let’s take a look at LGA 1851, the alleged successor to LGA 1700 and the CPU socket that will potentially enable next year’s 14th Gen Core series desktop processors.
LGA 1851 breakdown
The LGA 1851 socket measures in at 45 x 37.5mm. That’s the exact same as the current LGA 1700 socket. Even the pin pitch (distance between adjacent pins) is identical between the two at 0.800mm. Therefore, it stands to reason that cooler compatibility may not be lost when switching to this new socket, a luxury that Intel has sorely lacked in the face of AMD’s legendary AM4 platform. As you can see in the leaked slide above, the only difference that can be spotted is the height integrated heat spreader (IHS) which is ever-so-slighly larger in LGA 1851, as compared to LGA 1700. The size moves from 6.73mm – 7.4mm in LGA 1700 to 6.83mm – 7.49mm in LGA 1851. That constitutes a very small difference, so new fasteners may be required to compensate for this change, or you may just need to be extra careful while installing the cooler. The reason behind why the ISH is a bit taller can be attributed to the new tile architecture debuting with Meteor Lake. Intel has explicitly stuck with monolithic designs for its mainstream CPUs since the start. All rumors point to Meteor Lake being Intel’s first MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) processor family. Essentially, there are multiple separate tiles inside a single CPU, one for the CPU itself, one for graphics, and one for I/O. This tile architecture is based on Intel’s Foveros packaging technology, similar but different to AMD’s 3D V-Cache. Both are advanced packaging technologies that make use of MCM designs, but either’s approach to such is vastly different. Alder Lake and current-gen Ryzen 5000 desktop processors (except for the 5800X3D) are standard monolithic chips, for context. Moreover, the leaked slide also gives us a look at the alleged design of the Meteor Lake desktop package. In the picture attached below, you can see that there are two dies (tiles) present on the chip, however the I/O tile I just mentioned is missing. The discovery of the three tiles was made through a mobile Meteor Lake chip, so maybe Intel will omit the I/O tile on desktop variants. Lastly, it’s important to mention that the same slide depicts Arrow Lake before Meteor Lake, which could be hinting at a possibility of Arrow Lake actually releasing before Meteor Lake. That would make Arrow Lake, previously 15th Gen Core series, a successor to Raptor Lake which would, in turn, make Arrow Lake the 14th Gen Core series. We don’t have a lot of information on Intel’s 2024 lineup of desktop processors, whereas next year’s 14th Gen Core series has received a lot of leaks and reports. So far, even Intel’s own official roadmap puts Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake together as part of their 2023 and 2024 releases, so we can’t confirm anything. However, keep in mind that these products are still years away at this point so treat any and every rumor as, well, exactly that; a rumor. Things are certainly subject to change.
