Intel Arrow Lake chips have about a hundred “extra” contacts – they do not connect to the LGA 1851 socket

At the presentation of Intel Arrow Lake processors in Japan, MSI employees manually counted the pads on the back of the CPU and found that there were more than 1851 of them. This unusual discovery confirmed the presence of additional pads that are not connected to the pins of the LGA 1851 socket and are intended solely for diagnostics of the chip.

Image source: Intel

Intel recently held an event in Japan dedicated to the Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake processors, it took place the day after their official announcement. The main attention was paid to improving the performance and energy efficiency of new products. The discussion of new developments and capabilities of Arrow Lake also included representatives of leading OEMs – MSI, ASRock, Gigabyte and Asus, who demonstrated their innovations. After the main presentation, Intel and its partners showed new models of motherboards and conducted performance tests of Arrow Lake, and also assembled a personal computer (PC) based on it.

A distinctive feature of Arrow Lake processors is the presence of more than 1851 contact pads at the base of the processor. However, these additional elements, as it turned out, are not involved in data or power transmission, but serve solely for diagnostics and debugging.

To confirm the number of contact points, MSI employees Tsubasa Jisatra and Mr. Nakajima obtained printed images of the underside of the CPU and counted the rows and columns by hand, marking each row and column. In the process, they adjusted the count to account for gaps in the corners and in the center of the processor. As a result, it became clear that the number of contact pads actually exceeds 1851, although their exact number has not been disclosed. Repeated calculations showed that there could be about a hundred diagnostic points. These points do not actually receive electrical power since they are not in contact with the contacts on the socket.

Even though the Arrow Lake processors are already on sale, early benchmark results show that their gaming performance is only slightly better than their predecessors, Raptor Lake and competing AMD Zen 4 X3D series models. It is expected that future microcode and operating system (OS) updates will improve efficiency, but current architectural limitations will likely only be addressed in future generations of CPUs – Panther Lake and Nova Lake.