LGA 1356 (Land Grid Array with 1356 pins), also called Socket B2, is an Intel microprocessor compatible socket released in Q1 2012 for the two processor slot (2P) segment of the server market.
LGA 1356 is one of the two sockets designed as a replacement for the LGA 1366 CPU socket, the other being LGA 2011 (which is known as Socket R). LGA 1356 has 1356 protruding pins to make contact with the pads on the processor. Processors of LGA 1356 and LGA 1366 sockets are not compatible with each other since they have different socket notches. It supports Intel Sandy Bridge-E microprocessors, codenamed Romley-EN, marketed under the Xeon-E5 2400 series.
The main difference between LGA 2011 and LGA 1356 is 2 Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI)s connections on the LGA 2011 and 1 QPI connection on the LGA 1356. Other noticeable differences include 24 lanes of PCI Express (PCI-e) version 3.0 connections compared to 40 lanes on the LGA 2011, and three channels of DDR3 support compared to four on the LGA 2011. Each DDR3 channel can support one more DIMM (only applicable to DDR3 and not DDR3-L).
