Whats the difference between a Socket 7, Socket A and Socket 462 AMD processors?

Factual Questions
1

?

2

OK… the reason I ask is that my Motherboard manual says its a Socket A on the cover… which is what I thought… inside though it always refers to the processor as a Socket 462. I looked it up online and the info I had lumped the Socket 7 and Socket 462 together. Now I’m confused!

Help?

3

Well said :slight_smile:

Humor aside, I belive its just the form factor of the CPU/MB. Slot A came before socket A. Slot A was used for the older athlons, socket A is the for newer althlons (thunderbirds) and also is for the Durons. (a wanna be athlon) At least, this is how I understand it. As for socket462, I havent a clue.

Check out http://www.tomshardware.com or http://www.anandtech.com for more details.

4

Socket-A is Socket-462. Socket-A has 462 pins, which leads to it occasionally being called Socket-462. Socket-7 has nothing to do with Socket-A except that they’re both sockets, and AMD processors go in both (different ones though).

Elaboration:
Socket-7 was used for later pentiums and pentium MMX, and all of AMD’s processors between K5 and K6-3.

(Words in perentheses refer to codenames, and can safely skipped)

Slot-A, as CandyBoi said, was used for the original Slot-A Athlons (K7, K75, Thunderbird).

Socket-A is currently used for Athlon (Thunderbird), Athlon-C (Thunderbird at 133/266Mhz Bus), Athlon XP (Palomino), Duron (Spitfire, Thunderbird with less cache to save money and power), and Duron 1ghz and above (Morgan, Palomino with less cache to save money and power).

The other sockets currently in use are Socket-423, for the power sucking hellspawn known as P4s (Willamette), and Socket-478, for the faster and slightly cooler running hellspawn known as P4 (Northwood) running at 2Ghz and above.

There is also Socket-370 (aka PPGA or FC-PGA) which is used for Celeron-A, Celeron-2(Coppermine128), Celeron-3(Tualatin256), Pentium III(Coppermine256), and Pentium III again (Tualatin512)

FDISK
Op in EFNet #help, #celeron, #global
Regular in #athlon, #distributed

5

You use what the board has on it. Forget what the manual says.
Get a chip based on the board, not the manual.