system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are there new socket types for almost every CPU generation

Is there any benefit to it ? I mean, I get it that CPUs themselves are faster, but does the actual socket (for eg. LGA 1151 vs 1150) offer any additional benefits over its counterpart ?
gpt
Modern CPUs have a **lot** of things built into the chip.  You've got memory controllers, PCI Express controllers, USB controllers, graphics chips and all sorts of other things.  Motherboards need to be designed to interface with all of these things properly.  If the chip changes, you need to redesign motherboards & having different pinouts makes sure there's no confusion.

In years past, when a CPU was just a CPU & the motherboard chipset handled all those other features, it was much easier to share a CPU socket between generations of processors.  Back in the Pentium 2/Pentium 3 era, there were several major revisions of the CPU that could all work with the chipsets on *Slot 1* boards and, even after Intel upgraded to *Socket 370*, they were still *logically* identical so a Socket 370 CPU could be put into an adapter board and run in a Slot 1 motherboard without a problem.