It seems that owners of LGA1851 motherboards are in for a nasty surprise. Despite the fact that Intel's 800-series chipsets were officially introduced only in the third quarter of 2024, existing leaks indicate that they will support only one generation of processors - Arrow Lake-S.
In recent months, observers have repeatedly asked Intel about its continued support for the LGA1851 platform, but the company has avoided specific answers. Later, there were suggestions that Intel might release Arrow Lake Refresh in 2025, but according to preliminary estimates, this will be a minor update without a significant performance increase. In addition, the upcoming Core Ultra 300 line will include only older chips with unlocked multipliers (models with the "K" index).
The latest leak from the NBD logistics database indicates that the next generation of processors – Nova Lake-S (NVL-S) – is already being tested on a platform with the new LGA1954 socket. This effectively confirms that Nova Lake-S will not be compatible with existing motherboards based on Intel 800 chipsets.
As for Nova Lake-S (Core Ultra 400), the release of these CPUs is not expected before 2026. The productive cores will use the Coyote Cove architecture, while the energy-efficient ones will switch to Arctic Wolf. In the top configuration, the layout may take the form of 16P + 32E. Certain sources also mention the possible appearance of ultra-low-power LPE cores that will be located in the SOC chip. The increase in computing cores is perhaps one of the reasons for replacing the processor socket. Data on the supply of equipment for testing VRMs (voltage regulators), which is mentioned in the leak, also confirm that the new platform will retain support for PCI Express 5.0.