Intel LGA 1851 Platform Rumors: Longevity Up Till 2026, Arrow Lake CPUs First Desktop Family, DDR5

Aug 11, 2023

Some new information regarding the Intel LGA 1851 platform which will feature support for the next-gen Arrow Lake Desktop CPUs has been revealed.

We know quite a bit already about Intel's LGA 1851 socket platform but new information or rumors (as I would say) have been revealed by @leaf_hobby (via Videocardz). The leaker starts off by stating that Intel's LGA 1851 socket will last until 2026 so that should cover at least three generations of CPUs starting with Arrow Lake-S CPUs next year if we consider a yearly cadence. A recent report by Benchlfie reveals a 2H 2024 launch plan for Arrow Lake Desktop CPUs which is a year after the 14th Gen Raptor Lake's refresh.

LGA1851は2026年まで続投らしいねー

— TLC (@leaf_hobby) August 19, 2023

To quickly summarize the details, the rumors indicate the following features for Intel's LGA 1851 socket and Arrow Lake family:

On the memory compatibility side of things, Intel will be saying goodbye to DDR4 memory entirely and switching to DDR5 only for the LGA 1851 platforms. The platform is said to support faster DDR memory DIMMs (5th Gen) with faster speeds than the DDR5-5600 MT/s supported by existing Intel Raptor Lake (Refresh) CPUs. AMD also supports DDR5 memory only on its brand new AM5 socket & given the decreasing prices of the newer standard, it should be much more affordable and on par with DDR4 a year away from now. You can already find some kits at very decent prices so the value factor of getting a DDR4 motherboard/memory combo is diminishing almost every month now.

As for the CPU family itself, Intel's Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs are said to feature a range of titles that include IOE-P Tile, Compute Tile, SOC Tile, and Graphics Tile. This is part of the disaggregated chip design that will first be featured on the 1st Gen "Core Ultra" CPUs codenamed Meteor Lake in the coming months for laptops. The CPUs are said to adopt an additional LLC (Last Level Cache) & which might be the Adamantine Cache that we heard about a while back. There is also said to be a bigger L2 cache per core which is increased from 2 MB to 3 MB.

Benchmarks of an 8+16 configuration have shown up to 21% gain in CPU and over 2x iGPU perf vs Raptor Lake CPUs. These are projected benchmarks and can change by the time of launch. There are reports that the family is going to include a 6+8 and 8+0 configuration but based on previous leaks, we know the following SKU lineup for Arrow Lake-S chips:

For the iGPU side, the Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs will be incorporating a refreshed Arc Xe-LPG design based on the Alchemist architecture which will first be featured on Meteor Lake CPUs. This refreshed design might offer higher clocks and some key advantages and will be replaced by the newer Xe2-LPG GPUs featuring Battlemage architecture with the Lunar Lake CPUs though they will be delivered to ultra-low power laptops only.

Back to the Intel LGA 1851 platform, the first motherboards will be part of the 800-series family & include three SKUs, Z890, W880, Q870, B860, and H810.

The Z890 platform is expected to feature up to 60 HSIO channels (26 CPU + 34 PCH while the B860 and H810 platforms will feature 44 and 32 HSIO channels, respectively. Intel's 800-series platform will also support up to DDR5-6400 memory natively and with 48 GB memory module compatibility. Besides that, WiFi 7 and 5 GbE are also going to be talking points as Intel brings them to consumers across all segments.

Overall, it is definitely an interesting lineup but whether it will be enough to tackle the AMD Ryzen 8000 CPUs featuring the Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 core architectures next year remains to be seen. The company has an Innovation event planned for 19th September so we can expect more details then.