Igor’s Lab has shared several specifications of the upcoming Intel LGA1851 socket for Arrow Lake CPUs. As the name suggests, the socket will have almost nine percent more pins and will reportedly have native support for SSDs via the PCIe 5.0 bus standard.
According to diagrams from Igor’s Lab the socket LGA1851 has dimensions of 42.5 x 50.0 mm. This makes the socket the same size as the current LGA1700 socket. The 151 extra pins are therefore incorporated in the same form factor and should contribute to improving the I/O interfaces.
The socket also supports CPUs with a total of twenty PCIe 5.0 lanes and four PCIe 4.0 lanes. This gives the platform native support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Intel’s current LGA1700 platform has sixteen PCIe 5.0 lanes, which are officially intended for video cards. AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs, in turn, have 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes on the CPU and therefore support a video card and two PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Arrow Lake CPUs will support a PCIe 5.0 video card, a PCIe 5.0 SSD and an additional PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Furthermore, Igor’s Lab reports that CPU coolers for Arrow Lake require a higher dynamic pressure of 923N, compared to 489.5N with LGA1700. Therefore, a new mounting kit is likely required to use an LGA1700 cooler for new Arrow Lake processors, although the dimensions of the new socket are almost identical. Current mounting kits do not provide enough contact pressure and therefore do not work optimally, the German tech website writes.
Socket LGA1851 would initially be used for Intel’s Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake processors. However, Intel has been rumored to have scrapped its Meteor Lake desktop CPUs in favor of a Raptor Lake refresh. Meteor Lake processors for laptops have yet to appear. Arrow Lake is planned for next year.