A new leak has surfaced regarding Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors that raises the idea that overclocking will only be officially supported on the highest-end motherboards (Z890).
As spotted by Videocardz, some alleged Intel 800 series motherboard specs have appeared on X courtesy of @jaykihn.
Intel 800 series chipset specs. Preliminary, but I doubt they'll change before launch. There is no H810 SKU. These specs are valid with Arrow Lake-S. Note that ARL-S may not be the only architecture on 800 series chipsets. pic.twitter.com/diZqVSjsJAJuly 3, 2024
According to the spec table provided (add your own skepticism, as always with any leak), only the Z890 platform will feature voltage and base clock adjustments for overclocking. The other chipsets (Intel's H810, B860, Q870, and W880) won't have this capability, and it's further stated that there won't be any H870 motherboards at all.
So, the Arrow Lake desktop processors will be compatible with a total of five platforms. Traditionally, the Zx90 series of motherboards are the high-end options, while the B models are the budget-focused offerings, so having overclocking limited exclusively to the premium platform isn’t entirely surprising, if this leak is true. It will be a first for Intel, though.
The leaker believes that memory overclocking will be possible on the more affordable B860 motherboards, but the CPU voltage will not be increased like a Z890 board can. This means that those looking to push their system to the limit will have to shell out money for the most expensive Intel motherboards available.
Another interesting detail is the total number of high-speed PCIe lanes. The base configuration of the H810 is 33, while the B860 supports 45 and the Q870 goes up to 56. However, both the server-oriented W880 and Z890 are slated to support 60 high-speed PCIe lanes as standard.
Intel’s Core Ultra 200K CPU family is expected to debut in late 2024, so it’ll likely be another three to four months before Arrow Lake hits the scene. It’ll be the first time Team Blue’s “disaggregated architecture” has hit desktops, following Meteor Lake (and there’s also the upcoming Lunar Lake for laptops).
Intel's desktop computing landscape is changing
Arrow Lake represents the most significant shift for Intel since the launch of Alder Lake in 2021 (which introduced hybrid, i.e. efficiency cores). Not only is there an entirely new socket, LGA 1851 (up from LGA 1700), but the Intel Core Ultra 200K is the first desktop processor line to include more powerful, sophisticated versions of the NPU seen in Meteor Lake.
The entire computing world is embracing AI, and soon not just laptop chips (like Meteor Lake) but also desktop CPUs will have built-in acceleration for AI workloads (in the form of that NPU).
The Intel 800 series platform is more advanced than previous iterations, as you’d expect, though it lacks Thunderbolt 5 support. Exactly what level of overclocking capabilities will be available on the new Arrow Lake CPUs remains to be seen, as we can’t take this rumor at face value as noted. What we do expect is that the Arrow Lake processors could have slower clock speeds than their Raptor Lake Refresh equivalents, though they’ll still be faster (of course, they’ll have to be) due to architectural improvements and other tweaks.
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