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. Slot A motherboards use the EV6 bus protocol, a technology originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for its Alpha 21264 microprocessor.
thumb|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.
| Athlon, Duron (Slot A, Socket A), Alpha 21264
| 100 (200MT/s)
| AMD-756, VIA-VT82C686A
| align="left" | AGP 2×, SDRAM<br />Irongate chipset family; early steppings had issues with AGP 2×; drivers often limited support to AGP 1×; later fixed with "super bypass" memory access adjustment.
|}
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