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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 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 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 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.
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, the aforementioned problems mentioned above still lingered on for quite a while, even for Athlon CPUs.
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