Intel appears to be cooking up a beefier Nova Lake socket clamp to stop its future desktop chips getting bendy or crispy.
If you are a hardware enthusiast, you probably know Intel’s independent loading mechanism, or ILM, can warp CPUs over time. The ILM is the retention clamp that holds the CPU in the socket, which sounds dull until your chip starts looking like a Pringle.
According to Hot Hardware Chipzilla released a reduced-load version of the ILM with Arrow Lake, which mostly fixed the issue, but made it optional. Now Chipzilla appears to have another ILM variant coming with Nova Lake. This one looks less about correcting curvature and more about dealing with high current.
Older processors used pin grid array sockets, or PGA, where the pins sat on the CPU itself. Modern chips use land grid array sockets, or LGA, where the pins live in the socket instead.
LGA has plenty of advantages, including denser pins, better electrical performance and CPUs that are less likely to be mangled by ham-fisted builders. The downside is that it needs a precise compression force to ensure the CPU and socket contact each other properly.
That is why Intel uses ILMs, while…