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

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

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 Slot1 motherboards to discourage accidental insertion of a Slot1 processor into a SlotA motherboard, and vice versa. The choice to use the same mechanical connector as the Intel Slot1 also allowed motherboard manufacturers to keep costs down by stocking the same part for both Slot1 and SlotA 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.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 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, this was not enough to prevent the aforementioned problems mentioned above, and this phenomenon still lingered on for quite a while, even for Athlon CPUs.

See also

• List of AMD processors

References