**Intel's Shift to Socket 1851: A New Era with Uncertain Future**

Intel is making a significant change to its motherboard socket, moving from LGA 1700 to LGA 1851. This means that there will be no backwards compatibility with older motherboards, and users will have to upgrade their systems if they want to continue using Intel processors. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's still a significant change that may affect enthusiasts who are used to being able to upgrade their CPUs without worrying about compatibility issues.

**AMD's Am5: A More Secure Upgrade Path**

In contrast, AMD has already announced its new socket, Am5, which will be supported for the foreseeable future. This means that users can expect to see a more predictable upgrade path from one generation of CPUs to the next. While Intel's decision may seem like a backward step, it's actually a nod to the fact that the industry is moving towards more efficient and power-conscious designs.

**The 800 Series Chipset: A Copy-Paste Effort?**

Intel's new chipset, based on the Raptor Lake architecture, looks uncannily similar to its predecessor, the 700 series. This has led some to wonder if Intel was simply copying and pasting code rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation. The lack of PCIe Gen 5 lanes is particularly notable, as this feature is already available on AMD's X3D chips.

**Native Connectivity: A Step Backwards?**

Despite the advancements in technology, native connectivity has actually taken a step back in Intel's new desktop CPUs. Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 7 are still missing, and users will have to rely on secondary controllers on their motherboards to get these features. This is particularly disappointing given that these premium features were already available on Intel's previous generation of processors.

**A Theory: The NPU as a Marketing Bullet Point**

One theory is that the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) was added to Intel's Enthusiast platform solely for marketing purposes, rather than because it's actually needed by most users. With discrete GPUs capable of running circles around an NPU, it's hard to see why this feature would be necessary in a system designed specifically for gaming and content creation.

**CPU Cooler Compatibility: A Silver Lining?**

Despite the changes brought about by Intel's new socket, many manufacturers have confirmed that their coolers compatible with LGA 1700 will also work on LGA 1851. This is a welcome news, as it means that users won't have to worry about compatibility issues when upgrading to new CPUs.

**The Future of CPU Performance: A Plateau?**

Intel's focus on power consumption and heat reduction may be seen as a step back from the performance gains that users were expecting from each new generation. While this approach is exciting for thin-and-light laptops, it may not have the same impact on desktop systems where frame rate increases are more noticeable. AMD's X3D chips have already shown that it's possible to achieve significant performance gains without sacrificing power consumption.

**The Enthusiast Desktop Market: Disappointed but Hopeful**

While Intel's shift to LGA 1851 may not be what enthusiasts were expecting, there's still a lot to look forward to. With weeks until the launch of Arrow Lake S, it's possible that Intel is sandbagging its results or holding back on some exciting features. Only time will tell if this approach will pay off for Intel in the long run.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell everyone we now officially know a lot more about Intel's AOL Lake s there's some really incredible things going on here but there's a lot of items that a lot of you will feel like are a big step backwards for Intel and the desktop CPU Market in general so basically what I wanted to do here is I want to go through all of the elements that Intel told us about and what we would expect from arake s when reviews go live a little bit later this month but first a message from our sponsor I don't know how fantex does it but the XD lineup offers incredible value for your money with these mid Towers the interior is ready for today's challenging needs with a 360 up top up to 10 120 mil fans any GPU would fit it's BTF ready and your choice of a cool presentation with the XT view model or high performance with the XD pro and pro Ultra all of the illumination is tasteful and appreciate at this price point and everything is double boxed with protective Corners so the XTS travel safe check them out below and spend responsibly so let's start right off the top with the specs of the aake S lineup and this is maybe a good thing because it seems like Intel has condensed things down to a little bit more compact format here so there's just three different core layouts both with and without integrated gpus they range from 24 cores on the ultra 9 to 14 cores on the Ultra 5 and just like on lunar Lake laptop chips the desktop processors lack smt so they have an equal number of cores and threads meanwhile the maximum achievable clock speeds have a 500 MHz Delta between the lowest and highest end CPUs just like with lunar Lake the instructions per clock or IPC and arrow Lake got a shot of adrenaline versus what we saw in Raptor Lake especially those ecores Arrow Lake processors they're going to be relying heavily on those IPC uplifts though since maximum clock speeds have been dialed back by quite a bit and to balance that out Intel is also augmented the base frequency which points towards the Ultra 200k Series possibly being able to run at higher speeds for longer periods of time and that'll be absolutely necessary since with the elimination of simultaneous multi-threading on the P cores every processor here has a lower overall thread count than their predecessors and look by this point in smt's life we know that real cores are better than virtual ones but by how much we'll just have to see pricing on the other hand well it's a bit lower than the 14th and 13th gen CPUs launched for but not by all that much a few bucks here and there but nothing more overly the ryzen 9 000 series onto this at least at their current average selling prices across the US and you can see exactly what Intel is doing they're finding those gaps in amd's lineup and parachuting a chip into each of them so the ultra 9 285k undercuts the 950x but cost more than the 9900x the ultra 7 265k lands between the 9900x and 9700x while the Ultra 5 245k narrowly undercuts the 9700 X's new lower price so that's all great but there's actually big elephant in the room here for the Enthusiast desktop Market specifically and that is Arrow Lake s has been designed from the ground up to put efficiency before overall performance and that's actually I guess good news because if you remember when raptor Lake and Alder Lake were released there was Flames everywhere everybody was critiquing it because it ran too hot and it was too power hungry so that's really good news right well not so fast because the ultra 9 and Ultra 7 processors still have the same base and maximum Turbo Power envelopes as their predecessors meanwhile the Ultra 5 245k goes up to 159 Watts that doesn't mean the processors will actually hit those maximum values all day every day but just because Intel says they're efficient it doesn't mean they're rated to consume less power in an allcore workload at least and I think this one point and that's sustained power will be a super critical factor in any event evaluation of Arrow Lake Raptor Lake K series chips were designed to hit their maximum Turbo Power almost all the time or even go above that provided they were given enough cooling so will Arrow Lake chips do the exact same as Raptor Lake meaning that they are no less power hungry than the previous generation well we have no way of knowing that because what they could be doing here is using that 159 wat to 250 W power Envelope as guidelines it could could be that in everyday scenarios or even in all core workloads they could be consuming a lot less than that a lot really hinges on the answer to that question and we'll only get answers once we're able to actually review these chips remember past a certain point pumping more power into any CPU tends to give you ever diminishing returns we saw it with lunar Lake on the laptop side and we're seeing it again here with performance per watt scaling really falling off above 150 wats so to me what it looks like here is that we have an architecture that is being pushed for all its worth in order to just compete in the Enthusiast desktop space but there is a silver lining here and that is how Intel is treating power consumption in lightly threaded workloads which is good for pretty much everyone because PCS they're not a one-dimensional object even Gamers tend to buy a PC and expect it to do everything from productivity to gaming and sometimes a lot more a lot of games are also lightly threaded too and that focus on efficiency in lightly threaded scenarios well it can direct directly lead to power reductions in gaming 2 sometimes the effects can be huge When comparing the 285k to the 14900 K naturally some titles will be affected more than others and less power consumption leads to lower temperatures when both chips are running on an identical cooler considering heat was one of the main critiques of previous Intel Generations well this should be an easy win for them and if this all comes true there could be some really big trickle down effects too specifically for the sff market so imagine running a higher-end Intel chip without having to tweak it on a cooler like this while running this at anything about the 100% fan speed that you would have to right now the other thing that you have to remember is that less overall wattage means less heat is actually being dumped into your case so a hyperfocus on efficiency with lower clocks and reduced thread counts leads to less performance right well not really at least not according to Intel since the 285k seems to get relatively good performance increases versus the 14900 K and that also leads to a narrow lead over the 950x at least in Intel's own benchmarks and then we have single thread performance and I'll be honest with you during the briefing this is where I really pumped the brakes and said yikes instead of the massive leap Ford we saw with lunar Lake versus 14th gen chips AOL Lake sees a barely incremental bump here and again Zen 5 well Intel comes really really close to losing the single thread performance crown and that's not a good thing and in order to mitigate some of the shortcomings we're seeing Intel has upgraded the graphics core on these chips to their XE LPG architecture though only with a four core layout I mean they know anyone rocking a K series CPU will be using a discrete GPU for gaming but what XE adds here is a completely upgraded media engine that has pretty powerful encode and decode capabilities which are so critical for media co-processing so efficiency is one thing great fine and dandy but if there's one thing people were hoping for from this gener eration of Intel CPUs is that we would have a new gaming champ on our hands or at least until AMD launches their ryen 9000 x3d chips but unfortunately take a breath here that is not going to happen because even according to Intel themselves the ultra 9 285k will be no faster than the 14900 K in gaming it wins some and loses some all while consuming less power but when the dust settles on most Benchmark Suites the best arrow Lake chip won't offer higher gaming frame rates than its predecessor let that sink in for a second but look closer and there's a few things going on here that might actually be stacking the deck in Intel's favor like a bunch of these results were run using their application Optimizer or APO which could have inflated the numbers there's also for some reason two F1 games but I got to give it to them there's still a fair number of newer titles too unlike AMD there's no strange Brigade or 6-year-old Tomb Raider thank God I also need to call out that the results were done with an RTX 490 but at 1080p on high settings and that tends to tighten things up a bit when compared to some reviews which test a 1080p low or even 720p technically the ultra 9 285k also trades blows with the 950x being no faster or slower across most games though if a benchmark Suite skews One Way or Another in terms of games favoring specific platforms there could be a narrow wind for either side you'll also notice that the game selection here is a bit different from the last chart so obviously Intel is doing a bit of cherry picking but I've got to give credit where it's due they're showing a pretty balanced picture here with a mix of good and bad results rather than it being all sunshine and roses and yet amd's x3d chips will probably still dominate overall especially the 7800 x3d or whatever amd's plans are for the 9000 x3d Series however if you're more hybrid user that uses your desktop for Creative tasks alongside gaming well you've always had a tough decision and arrow Lake honestly it doesn't make that decision any easier so for a lot of people these results they're going to prompt a lot of negativity they're going to say that you know what Arrow Lake even before it's released it's a flop it just can't keep up in the one area where you were hoping an Enthusiast platform from Intel would Excel and that's in gaming but it's not all over yet because there's a few other the things that I need to discuss first of all there's memory compatibility since Intel has bumped speeds up from raptor Lakes officially supported 5600 megat transfers per second to 6,400 while the maximum capacity remains 192 GB with 48 GB per dim there's also the possibility of running upcoming CU dims which use an integrated clock driver on the dim itself to stabilize Communications between the memory modules and the motherboard at higher speeds with those modules Intel told us that ddr5 8 ,000 is probably going to be a sweet spot for Arrow Lake since the processor's IMC can still run synchronized in gear 2 mode as for overclocking there's good news and some bad news Intel says they've squeezed every conceivable bit of performance out of their peores so most overclocking will likely be focused on the E cores for this architecture nonetheless they're giving us a pretty big toolkit filled with some fun new settings to play with like improved clock speed granularity separate base clocks for each type of core temperature base voltage limit bypasses and a lot more so that's all good but I do need to go on a little bit of a a mini rant here and it has to do with motherboards because yes Intel is moving to socket 1851 so there is no backwards compatibility to older motherboards we already knew that and that in itself is not a bad thing AMD did it with moving to am5 but at least with am5 there is this sort of like upgrade story that might come in the future with Intel though what happens in the future that is so murky right now simply put they haven't committed to releasing any future CPU Generations on the socket that could mean it's a complete dead end for future upgrades at best there's a huge question mark here meanwhile AMD will be supporting am5 for the foreseeable future and on the face of things you actually need to wonder why there needed to be a new socket at all since the 800 series chipset looks like a copy paste of the 700 series right that down to its USB ports and lack of pcie Gen 5 Lanes meanwhile the a lake CPU itself comes with 20 Gen 5 Lanes 16 for the graphics and another four for storage devices meanwhile native connectivity has actually been cut down versus lunar Lake which is a surprise considering these desktop CPUs are supposed to cater to enthusiasts who want the best of the best while you get native Thunderbolt 4 both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 need to be added through secondary controllers on the motherboard I mean I get that 2.5 GBE and Thunderbolt 5 are premium features Intel Partners would love to charge an arm and a leg for so why the lack of advanced Wireless capabilities and I have a little bit of a theory about this that is because valuable die space and resources went into one thing and that is adding an npu of all things to Intel's Enthusiast platform and to me that's something no one in this target market really wants and even less people will actually need I mean look these processors are going to be sitting in a system with a discrete GPU that can run circles around an npu so you've really got to wonder why other than a marketing bullet point this thing is even here okay I got to take a step back from that rant and shift gears because there's also some questions surrounding CPU Cooler compatibility with LGA 1851 and there's good news there so first of all we've talked to a bunch of Manufacturers and most of their coolers that are listed as LGA 1700 compliant will also be compatible with this new socket the big question that's swirling around though right now is how those coolers will actually perform because there are some fundamental differences between Arrow Lake s's die layout and Raptor Lake because based on Intel's die shots at least Arrow Lake's hotspot so where all the cores are clustered together has moved northwards versus the more centrally located one on almost every other previous generation Intel chip whether or not that'll affect the ranking of heat sinks in our testing well that remains to be seen But one thing's for sure this definitely poses new challenges for cooler manufacturers so where does this land us weeks before a lake S reviews can even be launched out there into the wild well like it or not Intel's narrative it has changed in a big way they needed to Pivot it because a lake s it just cannot provide that generational uplift that people were expecting from a brand new Intel architecture so where did they go they went down the efficiency marketing points route which sort of makes sense here but for a lot of people this is sort of going to be like that backwards Evolution meme it's it's just not what they expected and while this kind of focus on power consumption and heat reduction is exciting especially for certain markets I can't help but feel it's going to be a hard sell to all of us Gamers and enthusiasts mostly because there's a lack of consistent frame rate increases from one generation to the next and that's something something people wanted and amd's x3d chips even older ones already accomplished right now at least without the ability to do independent benchmarks this feels like an amazing architecture but one that's simply on the wrong platform this approach worked and it worked really well for thin and light laptops with lunar Lake for desktop gaming PCs well that's a whole other ball game guys so while I'm still hyped about what Arrow Lake and this entire new Intel approach can do on the laptop side I can't really say that I'm quite as happy with what we're seeing right now in the Enthusiast desktop Market but heck I mean we're still weeks away from launch maybe things will change maybe somehow Intel is like sandbagging their Real Results I'm just hoping that I'm surprised but right now this just points towards there being a hopefully temporary plateau in the CPU performance Market but anyways I'm Mike with har Canucks I will see you I guess in the review of Arrow Lake S have a great day guyswell everyone we now officially know a lot more about Intel's AOL Lake s there's some really incredible things going on here but there's a lot of items that a lot of you will feel like are a big step backwards for Intel and the desktop CPU Market in general so basically what I wanted to do here is I want to go through all of the elements that Intel told us about and what we would expect from arake s when reviews go live a little bit later this month but first a message from our sponsor I don't know how fantex does it but the XD lineup offers incredible value for your money with these mid Towers the interior is ready for today's challenging needs with a 360 up top up to 10 120 mil fans any GPU would fit it's BTF ready and your choice of a cool presentation with the XT view model or high performance with the XD pro and pro Ultra all of the illumination is tasteful and appreciate at this price point and everything is double boxed with protective Corners so the XTS travel safe check them out below and spend responsibly so let's start right off the top with the specs of the aake S lineup and this is maybe a good thing because it seems like Intel has condensed things down to a little bit more compact format here so there's just three different core layouts both with and without integrated gpus they range from 24 cores on the ultra 9 to 14 cores on the Ultra 5 and just like on lunar Lake laptop chips the desktop processors lack smt so they have an equal number of cores and threads meanwhile the maximum achievable clock speeds have a 500 MHz Delta between the lowest and highest end CPUs just like with lunar Lake the instructions per clock or IPC and arrow Lake got a shot of adrenaline versus what we saw in Raptor Lake especially those ecores Arrow Lake processors they're going to be relying heavily on those IPC uplifts though since maximum clock speeds have been dialed back by quite a bit and to balance that out Intel is also augmented the base frequency which points towards the Ultra 200k Series possibly being able to run at higher speeds for longer periods of time and that'll be absolutely necessary since with the elimination of simultaneous multi-threading on the P cores every processor here has a lower overall thread count than their predecessors and look by this point in smt's life we know that real cores are better than virtual ones but by how much we'll just have to see pricing on the other hand well it's a bit lower than the 14th and 13th gen CPUs launched for but not by all that much a few bucks here and there but nothing more overly the ryzen 9 000 series onto this at least at their current average selling prices across the US and you can see exactly what Intel is doing they're finding those gaps in amd's lineup and parachuting a chip into each of them so the ultra 9 285k undercuts the 950x but cost more than the 9900x the ultra 7 265k lands between the 9900x and 9700x while the Ultra 5 245k narrowly undercuts the 9700 X's new lower price so that's all great but there's actually big elephant in the room here for the Enthusiast desktop Market specifically and that is Arrow Lake s has been designed from the ground up to put efficiency before overall performance and that's actually I guess good news because if you remember when raptor Lake and Alder Lake were released there was Flames everywhere everybody was critiquing it because it ran too hot and it was too power hungry so that's really good news right well not so fast because the ultra 9 and Ultra 7 processors still have the same base and maximum Turbo Power envelopes as their predecessors meanwhile the Ultra 5 245k goes up to 159 Watts that doesn't mean the processors will actually hit those maximum values all day every day but just because Intel says they're efficient it doesn't mean they're rated to consume less power in an allcore workload at least and I think this one point and that's sustained power will be a super critical factor in any event evaluation of Arrow Lake Raptor Lake K series chips were designed to hit their maximum Turbo Power almost all the time or even go above that provided they were given enough cooling so will Arrow Lake chips do the exact same as Raptor Lake meaning that they are no less power hungry than the previous generation well we have no way of knowing that because what they could be doing here is using that 159 wat to 250 W power Envelope as guidelines it could could be that in everyday scenarios or even in all core workloads they could be consuming a lot less than that a lot really hinges on the answer to that question and we'll only get answers once we're able to actually review these chips remember past a certain point pumping more power into any CPU tends to give you ever diminishing returns we saw it with lunar Lake on the laptop side and we're seeing it again here with performance per watt scaling really falling off above 150 wats so to me what it looks like here is that we have an architecture that is being pushed for all its worth in order to just compete in the Enthusiast desktop space but there is a silver lining here and that is how Intel is treating power consumption in lightly threaded workloads which is good for pretty much everyone because PCS they're not a one-dimensional object even Gamers tend to buy a PC and expect it to do everything from productivity to gaming and sometimes a lot more a lot of games are also lightly threaded too and that focus on efficiency in lightly threaded scenarios well it can direct directly lead to power reductions in gaming 2 sometimes the effects can be huge When comparing the 285k to the 14900 K naturally some titles will be affected more than others and less power consumption leads to lower temperatures when both chips are running on an identical cooler considering heat was one of the main critiques of previous Intel Generations well this should be an easy win for them and if this all comes true there could be some really big trickle down effects too specifically for the sff market so imagine running a higher-end Intel chip without having to tweak it on a cooler like this while running this at anything about the 100% fan speed that you would have to right now the other thing that you have to remember is that less overall wattage means less heat is actually being dumped into your case so a hyperfocus on efficiency with lower clocks and reduced thread counts leads to less performance right well not really at least not according to Intel since the 285k seems to get relatively good performance increases versus the 14900 K and that also leads to a narrow lead over the 950x at least in Intel's own benchmarks and then we have single thread performance and I'll be honest with you during the briefing this is where I really pumped the brakes and said yikes instead of the massive leap Ford we saw with lunar Lake versus 14th gen chips AOL Lake sees a barely incremental bump here and again Zen 5 well Intel comes really really close to losing the single thread performance crown and that's not a good thing and in order to mitigate some of the shortcomings we're seeing Intel has upgraded the graphics core on these chips to their XE LPG architecture though only with a four core layout I mean they know anyone rocking a K series CPU will be using a discrete GPU for gaming but what XE adds here is a completely upgraded media engine that has pretty powerful encode and decode capabilities which are so critical for media co-processing so efficiency is one thing great fine and dandy but if there's one thing people were hoping for from this gener eration of Intel CPUs is that we would have a new gaming champ on our hands or at least until AMD launches their ryen 9000 x3d chips but unfortunately take a breath here that is not going to happen because even according to Intel themselves the ultra 9 285k will be no faster than the 14900 K in gaming it wins some and loses some all while consuming less power but when the dust settles on most Benchmark Suites the best arrow Lake chip won't offer higher gaming frame rates than its predecessor let that sink in for a second but look closer and there's a few things going on here that might actually be stacking the deck in Intel's favor like a bunch of these results were run using their application Optimizer or APO which could have inflated the numbers there's also for some reason two F1 games but I got to give it to them there's still a fair number of newer titles too unlike AMD there's no strange Brigade or 6-year-old Tomb Raider thank God I also need to call out that the results were done with an RTX 490 but at 1080p on high settings and that tends to tighten things up a bit when compared to some reviews which test a 1080p low or even 720p technically the ultra 9 285k also trades blows with the 950x being no faster or slower across most games though if a benchmark Suite skews One Way or Another in terms of games favoring specific platforms there could be a narrow wind for either side you'll also notice that the game selection here is a bit different from the last chart so obviously Intel is doing a bit of cherry picking but I've got to give credit where it's due they're showing a pretty balanced picture here with a mix of good and bad results rather than it being all sunshine and roses and yet amd's x3d chips will probably still dominate overall especially the 7800 x3d or whatever amd's plans are for the 9000 x3d Series however if you're more hybrid user that uses your desktop for Creative tasks alongside gaming well you've always had a tough decision and arrow Lake honestly it doesn't make that decision any easier so for a lot of people these results they're going to prompt a lot of negativity they're going to say that you know what Arrow Lake even before it's released it's a flop it just can't keep up in the one area where you were hoping an Enthusiast platform from Intel would Excel and that's in gaming but it's not all over yet because there's a few other the things that I need to discuss first of all there's memory compatibility since Intel has bumped speeds up from raptor Lakes officially supported 5600 megat transfers per second to 6,400 while the maximum capacity remains 192 GB with 48 GB per dim there's also the possibility of running upcoming CU dims which use an integrated clock driver on the dim itself to stabilize Communications between the memory modules and the motherboard at higher speeds with those modules Intel told us that ddr5 8 ,000 is probably going to be a sweet spot for Arrow Lake since the processor's IMC can still run synchronized in gear 2 mode as for overclocking there's good news and some bad news Intel says they've squeezed every conceivable bit of performance out of their peores so most overclocking will likely be focused on the E cores for this architecture nonetheless they're giving us a pretty big toolkit filled with some fun new settings to play with like improved clock speed granularity separate base clocks for each type of core temperature base voltage limit bypasses and a lot more so that's all good but I do need to go on a little bit of a a mini rant here and it has to do with motherboards because yes Intel is moving to socket 1851 so there is no backwards compatibility to older motherboards we already knew that and that in itself is not a bad thing AMD did it with moving to am5 but at least with am5 there is this sort of like upgrade story that might come in the future with Intel though what happens in the future that is so murky right now simply put they haven't committed to releasing any future CPU Generations on the socket that could mean it's a complete dead end for future upgrades at best there's a huge question mark here meanwhile AMD will be supporting am5 for the foreseeable future and on the face of things you actually need to wonder why there needed to be a new socket at all since the 800 series chipset looks like a copy paste of the 700 series right that down to its USB ports and lack of pcie Gen 5 Lanes meanwhile the a lake CPU itself comes with 20 Gen 5 Lanes 16 for the graphics and another four for storage devices meanwhile native connectivity has actually been cut down versus lunar Lake which is a surprise considering these desktop CPUs are supposed to cater to enthusiasts who want the best of the best while you get native Thunderbolt 4 both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 need to be added through secondary controllers on the motherboard I mean I get that 2.5 GBE and Thunderbolt 5 are premium features Intel Partners would love to charge an arm and a leg for so why the lack of advanced Wireless capabilities and I have a little bit of a theory about this that is because valuable die space and resources went into one thing and that is adding an npu of all things to Intel's Enthusiast platform and to me that's something no one in this target market really wants and even less people will actually need I mean look these processors are going to be sitting in a system with a discrete GPU that can run circles around an npu so you've really got to wonder why other than a marketing bullet point this thing is even here okay I got to take a step back from that rant and shift gears because there's also some questions surrounding CPU Cooler compatibility with LGA 1851 and there's good news there so first of all we've talked to a bunch of Manufacturers and most of their coolers that are listed as LGA 1700 compliant will also be compatible with this new socket the big question that's swirling around though right now is how those coolers will actually perform because there are some fundamental differences between Arrow Lake s's die layout and Raptor Lake because based on Intel's die shots at least Arrow Lake's hotspot so where all the cores are clustered together has moved northwards versus the more centrally located one on almost every other previous generation Intel chip whether or not that'll affect the ranking of heat sinks in our testing well that remains to be seen But one thing's for sure this definitely poses new challenges for cooler manufacturers so where does this land us weeks before a lake S reviews can even be launched out there into the wild well like it or not Intel's narrative it has changed in a big way they needed to Pivot it because a lake s it just cannot provide that generational uplift that people were expecting from a brand new Intel architecture so where did they go they went down the efficiency marketing points route which sort of makes sense here but for a lot of people this is sort of going to be like that backwards Evolution meme it's it's just not what they expected and while this kind of focus on power consumption and heat reduction is exciting especially for certain markets I can't help but feel it's going to be a hard sell to all of us Gamers and enthusiasts mostly because there's a lack of consistent frame rate increases from one generation to the next and that's something something people wanted and amd's x3d chips even older ones already accomplished right now at least without the ability to do independent benchmarks this feels like an amazing architecture but one that's simply on the wrong platform this approach worked and it worked really well for thin and light laptops with lunar Lake for desktop gaming PCs well that's a whole other ball game guys so while I'm still hyped about what Arrow Lake and this entire new Intel approach can do on the laptop side I can't really say that I'm quite as happy with what we're seeing right now in the Enthusiast desktop Market but heck I mean we're still weeks away from launch maybe things will change maybe somehow Intel is like sandbagging their Real Results I'm just hoping that I'm surprised but right now this just points towards there being a hopefully temporary plateau in the CPU performance Market but anyways I'm Mike with har Canucks I will see you I guess in the review of Arrow Lake S have a great day guys\n"