The AMD Athlon X4 970 is a desktop processor with 4 cores, launched in July 2017. It is part of the Athlon lineup, using the Bristol Ridge architecture with Socket AM4. Athlon X4 970 has 2 MB of L2 cache and operates at 3.8 GHz by default, but can boost up to 4 GHz, depending on the workload. AMD is building the Athlon X4 970 on a 28 nm production process using 3,100 million transistors. The silicon die of the chip is not fabricated at AMD, but at the foundry of GlobalFoundries. The multiplier is locked on Athlon X4 970, which limits its overclocking capabilities.
With a TDP of 65 W, the Athlon X4 970 consumes typical power levels for a modern PC. AMD's processor supports DDR4 memory with a dual-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 2400 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 970 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 970, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, AMD is including the newer AVX2 standard, too, but not AVX-512.