If you’ve bought a motherboard with an Intel LGA 1700 socket lately, take a look at the socket cover. (Assuming you’re completely disassembling your PC, of course.) You might be surprised to find that it says it’s compatible with “LGA 1800” processors…which don’t officially exist yet. In the latest PCWorld YouTube video, Gordon and Adam ponder whether Intel is taking a page out of AMD’s book and switching to a longer socket business model.

It kind of makes sense, as Gordon pontificates. One, because the 13th-generation of Intel Core processors was a bit tenuous, and we essentially get it now because it was taking a long time to develop the 14th-gen Meteor Lake chip designs. That would have made Meteor Lake the second LGA 1700 CPU design in place of Raptor Lake, not the third. But don’t get too excited: he gives this rumor about a 5 percent chance of actually coming to fruition.

Intel’s two-CPU-generations-per-socket pattern is simply too well-established. Intel’s conservative nature is to be trusted more than some LGA 1800 branding on the sockets themselves — early rumors of an LGA 1851 socket design are already out there. The weird discrepancy might be more about the sockets physically fitting into the motherboards than the CPUs fitting into the sockets. Of course we’ll all have to wait a year (or more) to find out.

For more deep dives on the PC industry, and some nerdy speculation, be sure to subscribe to the PCWorld YouTube channel.

Core i9-13900K

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Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer

Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.

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