Intel’s Arrow Lake LGA1851 CPU socket detailed. Arrow Lake under the spotlight

New pinout details and I/O information regarding Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra 200 series CPUs codenamed Arrow Lake-S and its associated LGA1851 socket have surfaced. Jaykihn0 on X (Twitter) purportedly showed off a complete layout of the LGA1851 socket, along with details surrounding Arrow Lake’s I/O configuration for both mobile and desktop processors.

Jay’s information reveals that the I/O connectivity for Arrow Lake-S for the desktop barely changes compared to Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX processors for mobile. The only change being added to Arrow Lake-S is the addition of one extra USB 2 port to the PCH. Everything else remains the same, including the PCIe 5.0 support, featuring support for a single x16 slot and one x4 M.2 SSD, and the PCIe 4.0 support, which includes a whole host of connectivity such as secondary PCIe slots, Gigabit Ethernet, and SATA ports.

It’s worth mentioning that the accommodations only apply to what Arrow Lake-S can do with native connectivity alone. We will inevitably see high-end LGA1851 motherboards featuring third-party controllers for adding additional USB ports, Thunderbolt ports, and USB 4 ports for power users who need more than what the Arrow-Lake platform can offer.

Lunar Lake is quite different from Arrow Lake. Lunar Lake supports up to six USB 2 ports, two USB 3 ports, and, for the first time, two USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 ports. Lunar Lake will support UFS storage natively for the first time. UFS, or Universal Flash Storage, is a standard used extensively in smartphones and tablets. Despite being known as a sluggish performing standard for years, recent iterations of the UFS—particularly UFS 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0—have massively improved UFS’ bandwidth potential, with UFS 4.0 compatible storage solutions boasting speeds that rival some slower PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs.