Arduous manual counting by MSI Japan confirms that Intel's Arrow Lake processors have more than 1,851 pads beneath the CPU. As a quirky challenge from MSI, two of its team members attempted to count the total number of pads manually, at Intel's Arrow Lake launch event in Japan per ASCII.jp, which led to this fascinating discovery. We understand that these extra pads are there only for diagnostic purposes.
Intel's new LGA 1851 socket hosts a total of 1851 pins, with which 1851 pads beneath the CPU make contact. Notice we say pads and not pins since LGA-based CPUs don't have protruding pins underneath - as was the case with AMD's Ryzen CPUs before AM5.
