NVIDIA’s new Kepler graphics cards (such as the GTX 660 we recently reviewed) will be getting most of the PC enthusiast attention today, but there is a bit of news about AMD to talk about as well.

AMD Binning Trinity APUs With Defective GPUs as CPU-Only Athlon Processors - Processors 2

The Trinity APU die.

Thanks to a Gigabyte motherboard compatibility list that was accidentally leaked to the internet, it was revealed that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) would be repurposing Trinity APU dies that don’t quite make the cut due to non-operative graphics cores. Instead of simply discarding the processors, AMD is going to bin the chips into at least three CPU-only Athlon-branded processors. The Athlon X4 730, X4 740, and X4 750K are the three processors that are (now) public knowledge. All three of the CPUs have TDP ratings of 65W, and the X4 750K is even unlocked – allowing for overclocking. Further, the processors are all quad core parts with a total of 4MB of L2 cache (1MB per core).

The new Athlon-branded processors will be supported by the A75 chipset and will plug into FM2-socket equipped motherboards.

The following chart details the speeds and feeds of the Athlon processors with Trinity CPU cores.

  Clockspeed TDP
Athlon X4 730 2.8GHz 65W
Athlon X4 740 3.2GHz 65W
Athlon X4 750K 3.4GHz 65W

 

Unfortunately, there is no word on pricing or availability. You can expect them to be significantly cheaper than the fully fledged Trinity processors to keep them price-competitive and in-line with the company's traditional CPU-only processors.

Would you consider rolling a Trinity-based Athlon in a budget build?

Read about the new direction of AMD as it moves to producing Vishera processors and beyond.