It looks like Intel has more or less confirmed that their next-generation Alder Lake-S desktop CPUs will be featuring support on the new LGA 1700 socket. The Alder Lake-S processors will be branded under the 12th Generation Core family and will replace the 11th Generation Core family known as Rocket Lake when it arrives next year.

Intel's 12th Gen Desktop CPUs Confirmed To Feature Compatibility on New LGA 1700 Socket Platform With DDR5 Support

Intel post-Skylake based desktop CPUs are unlike anything the company has ever done before. The Rocket Lake and Alder Lake families, while architecturally distinct, have one thing in common, they do away with the traditional architecture design that we've seen on Intel CPUs in the last decade or so.

Rocket Lake makes use of a 14nm backport of a next-gen core architecture which is said to be a hybrid between Sunny Cove and Willow Cove while featuring Xe Graphics. Alder Lake on the other hand will be making use of next-gen Golden Cove cores but it's not the use of the next-gen cores that makes this chip interesting, it's the way it uses those cores. Alder Lake is going to utilize a BIG little core strategy, integrating both Golden Cove and Gracemont cores on a single-chip while also featuring next-generation Xe enhanced graphics engine.

While Rocket Lake CPUs will be accommodated on the existing LGA 1200 socket, the vastly different design of Alder Lake CPUs will require a new socket. Now we've heard reports from various sources that the Alder Lake generation will be supported on the LGA 1700 socket platform. Well it looks like Intel has confirmed this by posting the support datasheet for Alder Lake-S on LGA 1700 over at its Development Resource webpage as spotted by Momomo_US (via Videocardz).

With the new LGA 1700 socket, you can forget backwards compatibility as the socket utilizes a very different layout (45x37.5mm) which is a more rectangular shape compared to the square shape which we've become accustomed to over the years. Aside from the new CPUs, Intel's LGA 1700 is aiming to be the first platform to hit the market shelves with DDR5 support. In the previous post, leaks hinted at up to DDR5-4800 native memory support on 6-layer and DDR5-4000 on the 4-layer motherboards. This would mark a huge jump over the current native speeds of DDR4-2933 MHz.

Intel Mainstream CPU Generations Comparison: