Jul 7, 2011 20:11 GMT  ·  By

During the third quarter of this year, AMD will expand its lineup of Llano desktop APUs to feature new mid-range processors, and a recent report claims that among these chips the Sunnyvale-based company will also introduce a tri-core accelerated processing unit.

This information was uncovered by Fudzilla, which claims they have managed to confirm the existence of this chip.

According to the same website, the specifications of the tri-core APU closely resemble those of the yet-unreleased A6-3600.

This means that the chip sports three Husky x86 processing cores clocked at 2.1GHz, which can go up to 2.4GHz thanks to AMD's Turbo Core technology, 3MB of Level 2 cache memory, and an integrated Radeon HD 6530D GPU.

This packs no less than 320 stream processors, clocked at 433MHz, and is compatible with the company's Hybrid CrossFireX technology, which allows for the on-board GPU to be paired together with select discrete graphics cards to deliver improved performance.

Outside of the on-die graphics core, the new Llano APU will also feature an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz memory controller and a 16-lane PCI Express Gen 2.0 controller.

The TDP of the processor will be rated at 65W and is compatible with motherboards using the FM1 socket.

No details regarding pricing are available at this time, but the APU is expected to arrive in the third quarter of this year.

Also in Q3, AMD will introduce three other accelerated processing units from the A8, A6 and A4 product series, including the A6-3600, all of these featuring a 65W TDP and support for the Turbo Core technology.

Previous AMD triple-core processors proved to be a huge success among price-conscious users as most of them could be unlocked into fully working quad-core parts via a simple BIOS trick. No one can say if this will also be the case with this tri-core Llano APU, but history is definitely on our side.