Socket 754

Technical specifications

Socket 754 was the original socket for AMD's Athlon 64 desktop processors. Due to the introduction of newer socket layouts (i.e. Socket 939 and Socket AM2), Socket 754 became the more "budget-minded" socket for use with AMD Athlon 64 or Sempron processors. It differs from Socket 939 in several areas:

• support for a single channel memory controller (64 bits wide) with a maximum of three unbuffered DIMMs, or four registered DIMMs
• no dual channel support
• lower HyperTransport speed (800 MHz Bi-Directional, 16 bit data path, up and downstream)
• lower effective data bandwidth (9.6 GB/s)
• lower motherboard manufacturing costs

Although AMD promoted Socket 754 as a budget platform on the desktop and encouraged mid- and high-end users to use newer platforms, Socket 754 remained for some time as AMD's high-end solution for mobile applications (e.g. the HP zv6000 series). However in 2006, Socket S1 was released and superseded Socket 754 in the mobile CPU segment, with support for dual-core CPUs and DDR2 SDRAM.