Intel Z890 motherboard reveal reportedly set for October 10 — Arrow Lake CPU review embargo seemingly lifts on October 24

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Arrow Lake is right around the corner.

Intel Core i9 CPU
Intel Core i9 CPU (Image credit: Shutterstock)

A new rumor claims the purported appearance of Intel's new Z890 motherboards and upcoming desktop Arrow Lake processors. Алексей on X claims that motherboard vendors will reportedly announce Z890 motherboards on October 10, and Arrow Lake CPU review embargoes allegedly lift on October 24.

The claims support previous rumors that Intel is announcing its desktop Arrow Lake chips and the new LGA1851 platform this month. Intel's new platform will compete with AMD's brand-new Ryzen 9000-series CPUs and new X870E/X870 chipset motherboards.

Arrow Lake is the codename for Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200-series desktop processors. Leaks have confirmed that there will be Ultra 9, Ultra 7, and Ultra 5 SKUs, as well as at least three K series models. The Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and Core Ultra 5 245K will be the first Arrow Lake processors out of the gate. The non-K SKUs will arrive later, probably in early 2025.

Rumored clock speeds and TDP are purportedly lower than those of the 13th and 14th Gen CPUs. The maximum boost clocks on the flagship model are rumored to be well below 6 GHz, while the amperage rating for most of the chips is also purportedly lower than that of their Raptor Lake counterparts.

LGA 1851 is the all-new socket powering Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake chips. It features 9% more pins than LGA 1700 (the socket it replaces) and thus will have a more significant footprint compared to Intel's outgoing hybrid CPUs. LGA1851 is reported to have a size of 45 x 37.55mm.

The new platform is rumored to be DDR5 exclusive, representing Intel's first DDR5-only platform to date, just like AMD's AM5 platform. The flagship chipset, Z890, is rumored to come with expanded connectivity over Z790, featuring native Thunderbolt 4 connectivity and expanded M.2 support with PCIe 5.0 support for the primary M.2 slot and PCIe 4.0 support for the secondary slot. Z890 will also purportedly drop PCIe 3.0 entirely from the chipset.

We will know soon if all of these Arrow Lake rumors are genuine, as Arrow Lake and corresponding LGA1851 motherboards are slated to launch before the end of the month.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Amdlova
    With the z690 and z790 boards hitting 100usd new on ebay... this new launch will crash and burn.
    Got one 14700F new on ebay for 220usd.

    Dear intel we want new LGA 2066 with updates some pure 18 cores... thunderbolt 4 and some pcie 5.
    Reply
  • emike09
    Amdlova said:
    Dear intel we want new LGA 2066 with updates some pure 18 cores... thunderbolt 4 and some pcie 5.
    Couldn't agree more. Likely wouldn't be 2066 pins, but a true HEDT platform replacement that doesn't cost a kidney would be nice. I'm still holding strong to X299, even though it's showing its age. 6 years old and still a champ, heavy OC the entire time. That extra cache goes a long way as well, and I've used all 48 PCI-e lanes to their max, though I dropped dual-GPU out when I got a 4090. Memory benchmarks on fast DDR4 in quad-channel still beats many DDR5 dual channel kits for professional workloads. PCIe 3.0 is holding me back quite a bit in local storage workloads.

    Sapphire Rapids on LGA 4677 is interesting, especially their overclockable chips, but they're priced too high, and the competition from AMD makes them feel a bit bland. The 12-core Xeon w5-2455X is about 20% faster than my 12-core OC'd i9-10920X. Dropping about $2k for that kind of performance uplift is hardly justifiable, but at least I'd get some PCI-e 5.0 options.

    I'm all for increasing power efficiency, but only for thermals and efficiency/W. Power is cheap in my area. All these E-cores haven't sold me yet. I also don't need monstrous amounts of slow cores as many of my tasks demand high single-core performance. I'd love to see 18 or 24 P Cores clocked at 5Ghz base with the latest IPC offerings. Maybe OC it to 6GHz on my 360mm rad.
    Reply
  • emike09
    Amdlova said:
    *Signature*
    Are you still rocking a ASUS P8Z68-V I5 2500k???!!!
    Reply
  • thestryker
    Amdlova said:
    Dear intel we want new LGA 2066 with updates some pure 18 cores... thunderbolt 4 and some pcie 5.
    You can thank the combination of AMD and money people for the death of HEDT. The chances of it ever returning are basically zero because of cost.

    For elaboration sake because I love complaining about it:

    AMD released 16 core desktop CPUs at ~$750 for the competitive advantage since they still weren't quite up on IPC. They then moved away from HEDT that Threadripper had been and into a more workstation focused part because they knew Intel couldn't match core counts. This led to the starting part being 24 cores for ~$1400 which required, for the time, fairly expensive motherboards.

    That meant Intel couldn't sell flagship HEDT parts for ~$2000 anymore and had nothing competitive with TR. Due to this Intel didn't really put out much in the way of 10th Gen HEDT as the 9th Gen parts were available after 10th had largely sold out. This left motherboard manufacturers holding the bag on a lot of x299 chipsets (you could still buy brand new boards at retail prices ~2 years ago despite the last CPU release being ~5).

    As for why we haven't seen it come back I think it largely comes down to money. Server parts are requiring much larger sockets which drives up platform cost if they're to be reused for HEDT. Silicon costs are much higher due to the performance available out of desktop CPUs and how many cores are required to compete. DDR5 bandwidth has made memory bandwidth per core less of a concern on dual channel parts. SLI/Crossfire are dead technologies, and for the most part it's possible to find a desktop motherboard with enough connectivity. So without the gamer crowd being a resource to tap anymore and the margins being proportionally lower if they were to do HEDT like in the past (~25% more cost than desktop) the returns likely aren't there.

    They can already sell $400+ dollar CPUs to gamers and $1300+ (just using the price on Intel's 16/18 core Xeon W there are cheaper ones available with lower core count) ones to workstation users. Both of these undoubtedly carry better margins than if there were 24-32 core $1000 CPUs available on an intermediate platform.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    Hopefully the release information is nailed down. Looking forward to seeing the performance on this as well as Intel finally spilling the design and manufacturing specifics.

    If it's actually an improvement over Zen 4 X3D/Zen 5/RPL I might actually upgrade finally. Crossing fingers that there's a good 1DPC motherboard that doesn't cost $600+ should that end up being the case.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    emike09 said:
    Are you still rocking a ASUS P8Z68-V I5 2500k???!!!
    I have here my kit from 2012...
    Put to work almost a week, waiting for new ddr4 kit...
    Now I placed the cooler master V6-GT on the LGA1700 with a 13500T. Look this MONSTER
    Reply
  • bolweval
    Does anyone know if we'll need a new mounting bracket for our water blocks?
    Reply
  • jp7189
    emike09 said:
    Couldn't agree more. Likely wouldn't be 2066 pins, but a true HEDT platform replacement that doesn't cost a kidney would be nice. I'm still holding strong to X299, even though it's showing its age. 6 years old and still a champ, heavy OC the entire time. That extra cache goes a long way as well, and I've used all 48 PCI-e lanes to their max, though I dropped dual-GPU out when I got a 4090. Memory benchmarks on fast DDR4 in quad-channel still beats many DDR5 dual channel kits for professional workloads. PCIe 3.0 is holding me back quite a bit in local storage workloads.

    Sapphire Rapids on LGA 4677 is interesting, especially their overclockable chips, but they're priced too high, and the competition from AMD makes them feel a bit bland. The 12-core Xeon w5-2455X is about 20% faster than my 12-core OC'd i9-10920X. Dropping about $2k for that kind of performance uplift is hardly justifiable, but at least I'd get some PCI-e 5.0 options.

    I'm all for increasing power efficiency, but only for thermals and efficiency/W. Power is cheap in my area. All these E-cores haven't sold me yet. I also don't need monstrous amounts of slow cores as many of my tasks demand high single-core performance. I'd love to see 18 or 24 P Cores clocked at 5Ghz base with the latest IPC offerings. Maybe OC it to 6GHz on my 360mm rad.
    Intel has a gap in the HEDT market, but AMD has it thoroughly covered with 4, 8, 12 memory channels platforms ranging from 16-96 cores, a range of cache options, and gobs of PCIe. What else could you want?
    Reply
  • TheHerald
    thestryker said:
    You can thank the combination of AMD and money people for the death of HEDT. The chances of it ever returning are basically zero because of cost.

    For elaboration sake because I love complaining about it:

    AMD released 16 core desktop CPUs at ~$750 for the competitive advantage since they still weren't quite up on IPC. They then moved away from HEDT that Threadripper had been and into a more workstation focused part because they knew Intel couldn't match core counts. This led to the starting part being 24 cores for ~$1400 which required, for the time, fairly expensive motherboards.

    That meant Intel couldn't sell flagship HEDT parts for ~$2000 anymore and had nothing competitive with TR. Due to this Intel didn't really put out much in the way of 10th Gen HEDT as the 9th Gen parts were available after 10th had largely sold out. This left motherboard manufacturers holding the bag on a lot of x299 chipsets (you could still buy brand new boards at retail prices ~2 years ago despite the last CPU release being ~5).

    As for why we haven't seen it come back I think it largely comes down to money. Server parts are requiring much larger sockets which drives up platform cost if they're to be reused for HEDT. Silicon costs are much higher due to the performance available out of desktop CPUs and how many cores are required to compete. DDR5 bandwidth has made memory bandwidth per core less of a concern on dual channel parts. SLI/Crossfire are dead technologies, and for the most part it's possible to find a desktop motherboard with enough connectivity. So without the gamer crowd being a resource to tap anymore and the margins being proportionally lower if they were to do HEDT like in the past (~25% more cost than desktop) the returns likely aren't there.

    They can already sell $400+ dollar CPUs to gamers and $1300+ (just using the price on Intel's 16/18 core Xeon W there are cheaper ones available with lower core count) ones to workstation users. Both of these undoubtedly carry better margins than if there were 24-32 core $1000 CPUs available on an intermediate platform.
    To be fair the XEON W can be classified as HEDT. Although going for the 8channel ones will cost a pretty penny for the mobo, the 4channel ones are better. Still the CPU starts at 1.5k if you wanna get something faster than a normal 900k desktop chip.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    TheHerald said:
    To be fair the XEON W can be classified as HEDT.
    I see a lot of people say this, but they do not really share similarities of HEDT parts that existed in the past aside from being on a server socket. The cost of entry is significantly higher than desktop, they can only operate off of server class memory (RDIMMs), and carry none of the memory restrictions HEDT parts used to. So while there was never a strict definition of what is/was HEDT these platforms don't come even close to representing the market segment which used to exist. If the classification works for you by all means roll with it as I said there was never any real definition, but it just doesn't really make any sense to me.
    Reply