Do we *really* need 754 pins?

You can set the pin in the socket, although I've heard both negative and positive results (as in, it worked for a while, and then stopped working)

 

me with a ultra hot pentiun d 754 .65nm

 

I do believe that AMD also originally intended those socket formats to live on for a while beyond one or two revisions, so they deliberately put in more pins than really necessary to give them some breathing room for future revisions (e.g. It was said that if they wanted to support DDR-2, there was enough breathing room on both 754 and 940[2 channels] to do so).

I get by with 242 myself at home.

 

"Taking up the slack" is the key-phrase here.
I'm pulling numbers out from under myself now, but if a single physical pin is specced to carry at most 0.75A, you want to have many of them. And such specs aren't formulated for fun. Connector pins do turn into charcoal* if they carry too much current.

*actually not exactly that but you get the idea

 

sorry but i cant edit my posts