AMD's proposition for its APU line is that graphics are becoming increasingly important across a wide range of applications, not just gaming. The company calls out applications such as Winzip 16.5, Arcsoft Total Media Theater, Internet Explorer 9 and 10, VLC (both encoding and decoding) and GIMP (a free graphics editing tool) as examples of applications that perform substantially better on AMD APUs than equivalently priced Intel CPUs.

And on the gaming side, APUs have traditionally perform considerably better than Intel counterparts with integrated graphics processors.

The new A10 represents AMD's flagship APU. It's positioned against Intel's Core i3 3220. The A10-5800K offers four x86 cores running AMD's Turbo Core 3.0 boost technology, which boosts maximum clock frequency as high as 4.2GHz, though the normal operating clock rate remains at 3.8GHz.

Trinity's built-in AMD Radeon HD 7660D GPU includes 384 graphics cores (which AMD calls stream processors) running at 800MHz. It's worth noting that this number of stream cores gives the 7660D higher potential performance than AMD's entry-level discrete GPUs, such as the Radeon HD 7450, which only have 160 graphics cores. Given the emphasis on graphics, it's no surprise that the GPU takes up over half the Trinity die space.

Trinity's aggressive pricing suggests that its CPU performance may not compare well with even lower-end Intel quad-core CPUs, such as the Core i5 3450. On the other hand, the built-in Radeon HD 7660D graphics core should offer substantially better gaming and GPU compute performance than the Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics core built into the higher-end Intel CPUs. On the desktop side, most Intel dual-core CPUs ship with the lower-end Intel HD 2500 GPU, whose 3D performance is pretty anemic.