It’s less than a year since Intel’s 14th generation of CPUs hit the market, and they generally failed to impress anyone looking for a future-proof upgrade. Sticking to the same LGA 1700 socket as we knew from the previous two generations, and not offering much of a performance boost from the 13th gen, Intel’s most recent effort was more like filler to us. Don’t get us wrong, the i9-14900K is still a beast, but we want something new.
There has been plenty of speculation in the build-up to the Intel 15th gen release date, the socket type being one of them. We’ve long expected that the next generation will be using a new platform, and it now seems all but officially confirmed, as a new leak reinforces the existence of the LGA 1851 socket.
New LGA 1851 socket for Intel 15th gen
In a post on the Chiphell forums, we can see a snapshot of specifications for the upcoming Arrow Lake-S processors that will make up the Intel 15th gen. As we can see from the image below, the next generation will be using the upcoming LGA 1851 socket, with a number of specifications revealed.
Unfortunately, there is no sign of DDR4 support, just DDR5 – as is the case with AMD’s AM5. On the bright side, the cost of DDR5 hardware has been falling since launch and has become a more enticing upgrade for Intel users. On the current LGA 1700 socket, Intel has been supporting both platforms, but it looks like the time to move on has finally come.
In addition to this, we can see that the new processors will offer 16 dedicated Gen 5 lanes as the primary PCIe slot, integrated Thunderbolt 4 controllers, and DisplayPort 2.1 or HDMI 2.1 connectivity directly to the motherboard. On top of that, four additional Gen5 lanes and a Gen 4×4 interface (attached to the CPU) will allow users to connect an extra SSD without sacrificing Gen5 lanes for their GPU or storage.
Intel 800 series chipset previewed as well
Further details on the new 800 series chipset were also leaked, but not many specifics were revealed. We can see support for USB3 20G, 10G, and 5G connections without an exact number of ports specified. In contrast to the 700 series, support for PCIe 3.0 seems to be dropped altogether, instead focusing on the newer PCIe 4.0 standard completely.
