Intel Arrow Lake CPUs have more than 1,851 pads under the chip — MSI members painstakingly counted all pads by hand as a ‘punishment’ and discovered two extra rows

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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.

Intel conducted the launch event of its Core Ultra 200S “Arrow Lake” CPUs in Japan yesterday, going over the performance and efficiency gains offered by its new processors. The main announcement was followed by media sessions from several OEMs such as MSI, ASRock, Gigabyte, and Asus.

MSI’s team had a fun challenge for its members – count the total number of pads under the CPU manually. Tsubasa Jisatra and Mr. Nakajima were handed printouts of the CPU’s underside and conscientiously tallied – marking each row and column by hand, multiplying them, and offsetting the final count by the number of pads missing at each of the four corners and in the middle.

Surprise surprise, Arrow Lake CPUs actually have more than 1851 pads – though they didn’t mention exactly how many. After repeating the same process on our end, there are in fact around 100 or so more pads. An extra two rows of pads are used to debug the processor. Matter of fact, they are not even powered electrically since they don’t make contact with the pins on the socket. This is still a significant tally to confirm, as many would naturally assume CPUs have the same number of pads as pins on the respective socket.

Afterward, the OEMs showcased their latest and greatest motherboards, evaluated performance metrics, and assembled PCs live with Arrow Lake. Attendees could even bag some Intel original swag at the event by collecting specific keywords from Intel’s official social media accounts.

Intel’s Arrow Lake processors are now available to purchase but initial performance numbers are not that exciting. These CPUs struggle to achieve parity with the last generation Raptor Lake and Zen 4X3D CPUs in gaming. While we believe some of this can be alleviated with future microcodes and Windows Updates, Arrow Lake has some architectural limitations that are rumored to be addressed in Panther Lake and Nova Lake.