The upcoming LGA1700 socket by Intel, which makes its debut with 12th generation Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors, could be the first in over a decade from the company, to support more than two processor generations. Intel has maintained streak of ensuring that a mainstream desktop CPU socket won't be compatible with more than two generations of Core processors. Controversy brew when the company artificially segmented the LGA1151 socket between the 6th, 7th, and 8th and 9th processor generations, with the latter two requiring a 300-series chipset motherboard and the former two not working on the newer chipset, even though all four generations are pin-compatible, and modders have been able to get the newer chips to work on older 100-series and 200-series motherboards with great success.

According to a NotebookCheck report, Intel is designing the LGA1700 socket to support at least three future generations of Core processors (that's "Alder Lake-S" and two of its successors). This should give the platform a degree of longevity as it introduces several new computing concepts to the client desktop form-factor, such as heterogenous CPU cores. "Alder Lake-S" combines 8 each of low-power "Gracemont" and high performance "Golden Cove" CPU cores in a setup rivaling the Arm big.LITTLE, where light computing workloads and system idling are completely handled by the low-power cores, while the high-performance cores are only woken up from their power-gated slumber as needed, before being put back to sleep when they're not.