Why is socket 7 dead?

[repo man11]

My question is why no socket 7 Athlons? Are there any Electrical Engineers out there who can tell me why? I have one friend who speculated that crosstalk causes the need for an interface with more pins. After a brief detour into slot interfaces, the trend has definitely been more pins. Any other reasons?

[JetMech]

AMD realized the benefit of putting the L2 cache near the die so with the Athlon they mimiced the Pentium II but with their own pinout. Socket 7 became obsolete because it is too slow a technology (lag time getting info from the cache to the chip). Both companies moved back to socketed processors when die size and manufacturing innovations allowed them to put the cache directly on the die. The smaller the die the more room for larger amounts of cache and the cooler the chip runs and so on and so on ......

[eobard]

Multiplyer limits, fsb limits, power requirements, pre-planed obsolescence. Take your pick, they all played a part (along with a whole snot full of other reasons).

[JetMech]

Originally posted by eobard
Multiplyer limits, fsb limits, power requirements, pre-planed obsolescence. Take your pick, they all played a part (along with a whole snot full of other reasons). Roger that including the need to make half the worlds motherboards obsolete.

[repo man11]

The AMD K6-3 had 256k of on die cache. And the K6+ CPU's had .18 micron architecture,on die cache, and could run upwards of 600+ mhz. I've suspected planned obsolescence, but I wondered if there was one specific reason that they had to go from the 321 pin socket 7 interface, to the socket A. What is socket A 462 pins?

[JetMech]

Yes. I give AMD credit though. They've stuck it out with the socket A and as far as I know there's no change in the air. Intel is constantly changing sockets and chipsets but then they are also in the motherboard business.

[repo man11]

One of the reasons I became an AMD fan is realizing that Intel basically abandoned socket 7 and AT cases all in one move with the Pentium 2. Just a few months ago I had an old AT case running at 200 mhz, and very little money. Research led me to Tom's Hardware, and their article on running an AMD K6-2+ on the old Asus P55T2P4. For about $80.00 I jumped up to 500 mhz. I suppose that further development of socket 7 was a good business move for AMD, because if you wanted to upgrade your At box, they were the only game in town. But I like backwards compatibility, so they won a loyal customer.

[two_dope2000]

AMD has more time too concentrate on only theyre processors, unlike intel which also makes motherboards(and bad ones at that).