Athlon II X4 is similar to Phenom II X4, but with no L3 memory cache. Athlon II X4 uses AM3 socket, but is also compatible with certified AM2+ motherboards. When installed on an AM3 motherboard it supports DDR3 memories, but if you put it on an AM2+ board it will work with DDR2 modules.

Athlon II X4 main features include:

• Four processing cores
• 64 KB instruction L1 memory cache and 64 KB data L1 memory cache for each core
• 512 KB L2 memory cache for each core
• HyperTransport (HT) bus running at 2 GHz (8 GB/s). This clock may also be referred as “4,000 MHz”.
• Socket AM3
• Dual channel configuration (you need to install an even number of memory modules to use this feature).
• SSE4a instruction set (which is not the same thing as SSE4 from Intel).

On the table below we list all the Athlon II X4 models released to date. TDP means Thermal Design Power and indicates the thermal dissipation of the CPU, i.e. the CPU cooler must be capable of dissipating at least this amount of heat.