AMD’s Dual-Core Trinity’s APUs Could Arrive in Q3 2012

Besides the quad-core Trinity APUs to be introduced in June/July of this year, AMD’s next-gen desktop processor lineup will also include two dual-core chips, the A6-5400K and A4-5300, which will apparently be released during the third quarter of 2012.

Both of these APUs will include a single Piledriver module and will fit inside a 65 Watt thermal envelope.

Just as its naming implies, the A6-5400K is the more powerful chip of the two as this comes packing a 192 shader Radeon HD 7540D on-board graphics core and a dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory controller.

In comparison, the A4-5300 has to make do with a Radeon HD 7480D integrated GPU with just 128 streaming processors, while the DDR3 memory speed is limited at 1600MHz. 

Furthermore, the A6-5400K is also compatible with AMD’s dual graphics technology and has an unlocked multiplier, two features that were disabled in the lower performing A4-5300.

The clock speeds of these two accelerated processing units are not known at this point in time, but considering that the slowest quad-core Trinity desktop APU has a base frequency of 3.2GHz, Fudzilla expects these dual-core processors to support even higher clock speeds.

Both the A6-5400K and A4-5300 are compatible with FM2 motherboards and support AMD’s Turbo Core technology.

According to an AMD document leaked in the second half of last year, in terms of computing power, Trinity is expected to be about 20% more powerful than the current Llano APUs.

In addition, the chip will also bring support for a series of new instruction sets introduced with the Bulldozer architecture, such as AVX and AES-NI, as well as support for DDR3-2133 memory.

On the graphics side, the new Radeon HD graphics core is expected to deliver 30% better performance than Llano, while also coming with a new Video Compression Engine and support for AMD's EyeFinity technology.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview