DDR2

The Athlon 64 had been maligned by some critics for some time because of its lack of support for DDR2 SDRAM, an emerging technology that had been adopted much earlier by Intel.^[32] AMD's official position was that the CAS latency on DDR2 had not progressed to a point where it would be advantageous for the consumer to adopt it.^[33] AMD finally remedied this gap with the "Orleans" core revision, the first Athlon 64 to fit Socket AM2, released on May 23, 2006.^[34] "Windsor", an Athlon 64 X2 revision for Socket AM2, was released concurrently. Both Orleans and Windsor have either 512KiB or 1MiB of L2 cache per core.^[35] The Athlon 64 FX-62 was also released concurrently on the Socket AM2 platform.^[36] Socket AM2 also consumes less power than previous platforms, and supports AMD's virtualization technology.^[37]

The memory controller used in all DDR2 SDRAM capable processors (Socket AM2), has extended column address range of 11 columns instead of conventional 10 columns, and the support of 16 kb page size, with at most 2048 individual entries supported. An OCZ unbuffered DDR2 kit, optimized for 64-bit operating systems, was released to exploit the functionality provided by the memory controller in socket AM2 processors, allowing the memory controller to stay longer on the same page, thus benefitting graphics intensive applications.^[38]