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

Slot A motherboards use the EV6 bus protocol, a technology originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for its Alpha 21264 microprocessor.

In practice, third-party chipsets were heavily favoured by motherboard manufacturers.

[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 a while, even for Athlon CPUs.