Slot_A

Slot A

Slot A

CPU socket for AMD Athlon Classic CPUs

Slot A is the physical and electrical specification for a 242-lead single-edge-connector used by early versions of AMD's Athlon processor.[1]

Quick Facts Type, Chip form factors ...

The Slot A connector allows for a higher bus rate than Socket 7 or Super Socket 7. Slot A motherboards use the EV6 bus protocol, a technology originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for its Alpha 21264 microprocessor.

A Slot A CPU on the left compared to a Slot 1 CPU (connector rotated by 180 degrees)

Slot A is mechanically compatible but electrically incompatible with Intel's Slot 1. 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 CPUs in Slot 1 motherboards.

AMD went back into using a traditional socket interface with Socket A in 2000.

Chipsets

AMD offered official chipsets for the Slot A CPUs. These are included in the table below.

More information Model, Code name ...

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.[citation needed] A similar incident happened with third-party chipsets for Super Socket 7 CPUs, of which AMD tried to remedy it by putting quality assurance measures for the Athlon, which used Slot A CPUs. Despite this, however, the aforementioned problems mentioned above still lingered on for quite awhile, even for Athlon CPUs.

See also

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Slot A.
  1. [1]
    "CPU Sockets Chart". users.erols.com. Retrieved 2009-04-04.
  2. [2]
    "AMD-750 Chipset Overview" (PDF). AMD. Retrieved August 1, 2001.
  3. [3]
    Orozco, Silvino (December 29, 1999). "AMD's Super Bypass - AMD Improves their 750 Chipset". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved November 11, 2022.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Slot_A, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.