The AMD Athlon X4 870K was a desktop processor with 4 cores, launched in December 2015. It is part of the Athlon lineup, using the Godaveri architecture with Socket FM2+. Athlon X4 870K has 4 MB of L2 cache and operates at 3.9 GHz by default, but can boost up to 4.1 GHz, depending on the workload. AMD is making the Athlon X4 870K on a 28 nm production node using 2,411 million transistors. The silicon die of the chip is not fabricated at AMD, but at the foundry of GlobalFoundries. You may freely adjust the unlocked multiplier on Athlon X4 870K, which simplifies overclocking greatly, as you can easily dial in any overclocking frequency. With a TDP of 95 W, the Athlon X4 870K consumes a good deal of power, so decent cooling is needed. AMD's processor supports DDR3 memory with a dual-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 2133 MT/s, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. For communication with other components in the machine, Athlon X4 870K uses a PCI-Express Gen 3 connection. This processor does not have integrated graphics, you will need a separate graphics card. Hardware virtualization is available on the Athlon X4 870K, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) can run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications.