Intel Confirms LGA1851 is its Next Desktop CPU Socket

Intel as part of its development process with industry partners and OEMs, allegedly released technical documents in a bare URL that’s worded to confirm that its next desktop processor socket will in fact be the LGA1851. We’ve had some idea since June 2021 that LGA1851 will succeed LGA1700, but this can be taken as a confirmation. Although with a higher pin-count, the LGA1851 package will be physically of an identical size to LGA1700, with mostly identical socket mechanism, so the new socket could maintain cooler compatibility with its predecessor. The additional 151 pins come from shrinking the “courtyard” (the region of the land grid in the center that lacks pins and instead has some electrical ancillaries).

The new Socket LGA1851 platform is expected to power Intel’s “Meteor Lake-S” and “Arrow Lake-S” microarchitectures. Whether “Meteor Lake-S” gets the 14th Gen Core branding is a whole different question. Leaked benchmarks suggest that 2023 will be a rather slow year from Intel in the area of desktop processors, and that toward Q3-2023, the company will release the so-called “Raptor Lake Refresh” processors. These chips are likely built on the same LGA1700 package, and as we’ve seen from “Coffee Lake Refresh,” could warrant a new generational branding to 14th Gen Core (as CFL Refresh formed the 9th Gen Core). Intel could increase clock-speeds, E-core counts, and other process/packaging-level innovations to segment these chips apart from existing 13th Gen Core “Raptor Lake.” LGA1851 processors like “Meteor Lake” could debut chiplets for Intel, as these have their CPU cores, iGPU, memory-controllers, and uncore components, spread apart on chiplets built on various foundry nodes.