If you're new to building computers, one of the first little pieces of trivia you'll
probably come across is that AMD CPUs use pins on the bottom, while Intel ones use little
contact pads with the pins in the motherboard socket instead.
But why were these choices made? Do the engineers at AMD just think that pins are prettier?
Well, it turns out that the use of pins versus pads is a very deliberate design choice.
You see, Intel's approach of having pins on the motherboard instead of the chip, called
a land grid array, or LGA, typically makes it easier to fit more contacts into a smaller
space on the CPU. Modern CPUs need a lot of contacts for their high-speed features and to promote stable power
delivery by spreading out the current. The other thought is that because tiny pins are very fragile, you know, because they're
super thin, well, it would be better to place those on the motherboard rather than the CPU.
Because it's not uncommon to see a $400 CPU installed on a $150 motherboard.
So if one of those things was going to break, you'd rather it be the cheaper one, right?
Then you can reuse that CPU on a new motherboard.
Now of course, you can still mess up an LGA processor by touching the gold contacts on
the bottom with your oily little fingers. But overall, they are harder to damage than pin grid array or PGA chips, which are designed
to help improve your golf game. No, sorry, just kidding. PGA chips, the ones favored by AMD, are the ones with pins on their undersides, and compatible
motherboards for those have corresponding holes on their sockets.
Now immediately, you can probably figure out that this makes PGA chips a little bit easier
to damage. However, there are some upsides to using this design over a land grid array.
For one, the pins on PGA chips are a little tougher than the motherboard pins that you'd
see in an LGA socket, meaning that they are easier to repair in the event that they do
get bent, which I'm sure you can sympathize with if you have ever had the misfortune of
having to re-bend even just one damaged pin on an LGA motherboard.
The superior durability of PGA pins means that they can typically handle a little more
current than LGA packages too, which can be important depending on how the chip itself
is designed. And for another advantage that you can more readily experience firsthand when building
or upgrading your own PC, PGA chips tend to be a bit easier to install, since there
are no super-delicate motherboard pins to worry about, though of course, you do have
to make sure that you hit every hole in the socket properly.
These advantages have led AMD to keep using PGA for its consumer-level chips, even long
after Intel abandoned pins on their desktop chips way back in 2004.
And even though current third-gen Ryzen processors actually have more contacts on the bottom
than their Intel rivals, AMD still found a way to fit all those pins onto one package,
partly because the processors themselves are physically larger.
Now as you might have figured out, LGA does allow you to cram more contacts per unit of
area, so there actually are AMD chips that do use it.
Their Threadripper lineup for high-end desktop PCs and their Epic lineup for servers are
both based on land grid array designs with over 4,000 pins.
So if you're lucky enough to be using one of those monsters, definitely don't bend
any of those delicate motherboard contacts. As far as what all of this means for you, the consumer, though, well, nothing, because
you shouldn't be choosing a CPU based on whether it's PGA or LGA.
It doesn't really affect performance in the way that the architectural design or the clock
speeds or the core counts of the chips do. And the reason that Intel and AMD went their separate ways is just because they valued
different aspects of these designs, since each one does have their pros and cons.
It's just important to be aware of the pitfalls whenever you're installing either of them
so you don't mess up the bottom of your chip unless you want a very expensive coaster for
your, well, your shot glass, it wouldn't be a very big coaster.
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