Slot A is the physical and electrical specification for a 242-lead single-edge-connector used by early versions of

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Athlon AMD Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86, x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by AMD, Advanced Micro Devices. The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor a ...

processor. The Slot A connector allows for a higher bus rate than

Socket 7 Socket 7 is a physical and electrical specification for an x86-style CPU socket on a personal computer motherboard. It was released in June 1995. The socket supersedes the earlier Socket 5, and accepts P5 Pentium microprocessors manufactured by ...

Super Socket 7 Super Socket 7, also referred to as Super 7, is a hardware-level extension of the Socket 7 Zero insertion force, ZIF socket specification for x86 processors. It was released in May 1998. Compatible motherboards and chipsets use a standard Socket 7 ...

. Slot A

motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

s use the EV6 bus protocol, a technology originally developed by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) for its

Alpha 21264 The Alpha 21264, also known by its code name, EV6, is a RISC microprocessor developed by Digital Equipment Corporation launched on 19 October 1998. The 21264 implemented the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA). Description The Alpha 2126 ...

microprocessor. Slot A is mechanically compatible but electrically incompatible with

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Slot 1 Slot 1 refers to the physical and electrical specification for the connector used by some of Intel's microprocessors, including the Pentium Pro, Celeron, Pentium II and the Pentium III. Both single and dual processor configurations were impl ...

. As a consequence, Slot A motherboards were designed to have the connector's installed orientation be rotated 180 degrees relative to Slot 1 motherboards to discourage accidental insertion of a Slot 1 processor into a Slot A motherboard, and vice versa. The choice to use the same mechanical connector as the Intel Slot 1 also allowed motherboard manufacturers to keep costs down by stocking the same part for both Slot 1 and Slot A assemblies. Unlike with Slot 1 CPUs, there were never any converter cards, or slotkets made that allowed Socket A CPUs to be used on Slot A motherboards, as what happened with the slotkets made for using

Socket 370 Socket 370, also known as PGA370, is a CPU socket first used by Intel for Pentium III and Celeron processors to first complement and later replace the older Slot 1 CPU interface on personal computers. The "370" refers to the number of pin holes i ...

CPUs in Slot 1 motherboards. AMD went back into using a traditional socket interface with

Socket A Socket A (also known as Socket 462) is a zero insertion force pin grid array (PGA) CPU socket used for AMD processors ranging from the Athlon Thunderbird to the Athlon XP/MP 3200+, and AMD budget processors including the Duron and Sempron. ...

in 2000.

Chipsets

AMD offered official chipsets for the Slot A CPUs. These are included in the table below. Third-party chipsets includes a large number of VIA K-series chipsets. In practice, third-party chipsets were heavily favoured by motherboard manufacturers. Stability problems and compatibility quirks from these chipsets abounded from manufacturers not following chipset designers' guidelines. This caused long-lasting damage to AMD's reputation, despite AMD having nothing to do with the poorly-realised hardware. A similar incident happened with third-party chipsets for

CPUs, of which AMD tried to remedy it by putting

quality assurance Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to assure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design ...

measures for the Athlon, which used Slot A CPUs. Despite this, however, the aforementioned problems mentioned above still lingered on for quite a while, even for Athlon CPUs.

References

{{amdsock AMD sockets

Chipsets

See also

References