The AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE was a desktop processor with 4 cores, launched in October 2010. It is part of the Phenom II X4 lineup, using the Zosma architecture with Socket AM3. Phenom II X4 970 BE has 6 MB of L3 cache and operates at 3.5 GHz. AMD is making the Phenom II X4 970 BE on a 45 nm production node using 904 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 Phenom II X4 970 BE, which simplifies overclocking greatly, as you can easily dial in any overclocking frequency.
With a TDP of 125 W, the Phenom II X4 970 BE consumes a lot of power, so good cooling is definitely needed. AMD's processor supports DDR2 and DDR3 memory with a dual-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 1333 MT/s, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. For communication with other components in the computer, Phenom II X4 970 BE uses a PCI-Express Gen 2 connection. Although the processor doesn't come with integrated graphics, certain motherboards with compatible chipsets can provide this capability.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Phenom II X4 970 BE, which greatly improves virtual machine performance.