When Intel Alder Lake launches later this year, it will need a brand new cooler, or at least an additional bracket; the new LGA 1700 socket on Alder Lake is not surprising given its somewhat unorthodox shape, but Igor's Lab Recently announced plans by Igor's Lab suggest a complete reworking of the socket area for Intel's hybrid chips.

According to the plan, the new V0 socket design will replace the H5 socket currently used in LGA 1200-compatible Rocket Lake processors, which themselves are nearly identical to the H4 and H3 designs that fit the previous generation. [V0 sockets not only have different screw hole locations for air- and liquid-cooled cooler bracket/mounting systems, but also have a much lower Z-height, which places the CPU closer to the motherboard than previous socket designs.

Intel Alder Lake is expected to use a slightly elongated heat spreader (IHS) and interposer design compared to the current Core desktop footprint, which has not changed since the early days of the Core i3, i5, and i7 lineups. [With Alder Lake, everything changes. Whether Intel's dramatic overhaul will benefit the gaming sector remains to be seen, but perhaps with good reason. Essentially, Alder Lake will incorporate a cluster of "small" cores borrowed from Intel's Atom lineup and refined from it, along with a collection of "big" cores. The big cores come from a fork of the 10nm architecture that has not yet been experienced on desktops, but has been adopted for both mobile and servers. Specifically, Alder Lake will use the latest version of this fork currently available, known as Golden Cove. [There will also be changes to I/O, with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support and some form of Intel Xe integrated graphics. As a result, there is reportedly a need to rethink socket and package support across motherboards

.

It is strange that Intel is still talking about socket changes today when we just heard about a socket review at AMD; the AM5 socket could demand a major change from motherboard makers, and it will probably spill over to PC builders as well!

Therefore, the socket will be a big change.

So if you plan to buy an Intel or AMD next-generation processor, you may want to wait before buying a cooler. The best-case scenario is that an existing cooler can be made compatible with a few additional brackets, but the worst-case is a complete redesign to fit the Alder Lake footprint.

Also, given my recent difficulties in obtaining a Noctua kit to convert an Intel compatible cooler to an AMD compatible cooler, I would prefer not to have to wait months just to get a piece of metal with the correct screw holes.