Earlier this year, a Korean source had pointed out an easy method to enable a fourth core on the Phenom II X3. This was made possible by the way AMD has been designing its triple-core and dual-core processors based on the K10 "Stars" architecture: by disabling one or two cores on the quad-core die. "Sloppy" BIOS coding lead to the Phenom II X3 anomaly. It looks like a somewhat similar mod enables not one, but two cores on the sub-$100 Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition. A Korean technology website GiggleHD.com has reported a successful unlock of two cores.

The method is similar to that of the Phenom II X3 unlock: using flaws in BIOS code to enable cores, by enabling the "Advanced Clock Calibration" feature in the BIOS setup. The OS, Windows XP SP3, was able to see the processor as a "AMD Phenom(tm) FX-7750", while CPU-Z reads the name string correctly and lists the core count as 4. The motherboard in use is an ASRock A790GX/128M.

AMD is releasing a trio of dual-core desktop processors based on the K10 architecture, under the Athlon X2 7000 series. The trio consists of the overclocker-friendly 7750 Black Edition clocked at 2.70 GHz, the 7550 at 2.50 GHz and the 7450 at 2.40 GHz. The core, codenamed "Kuma" sports a basic cache design similar to the Phenom X3 and Phenom X4 processors, with 512 KB of L2 caches per core, and a shared L3 cache of 2 MB. The updated memory controller provides native support to the PC2-8500 (DDR2 1066 MHz) memory standard. The processor now sports a HyperTransport 3.0 3600 MT/s system interface. These, apart from the other tweaks AMD introduced with the K10 architecture give it an edge over current K8 based dual core AMD chips. The core is manufactured in the 65nm node.

AMD lifted the NDA over the Athlon X2 7000 series, following which several website posted reviews on the processors. Most of these reviews covered the Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition. The chip clocked at 2.7 GHz was found to be around 15% faster than a previous-generation Brisbane chip running at the same frequency, according to X-bit Labs, whose evaluation included several synthetic and real-world benchmarks. The same review team was able to overclock the chip to 3.30 GHz (+22 %) aided by a Zalman 9700 air cooler. The Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition will be priced at US $79. Links to some of the reviews are provided below.

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AMD is releasing its dual-core desktop processor based on the 65nm K10 architecture, codenamed Kuma. One of the first SKUs based on the core, the Athlon X2 7750, has been evaluated by Donanim Haber. The Athlon X2 7750 comes with a clock-speed of 2.70 GHz, and a HyperTransport 3.0 system interface. It has 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and a shared L3 cache of 2 MB. Donanim Haber put this chip to test on a Foxconn A7DA-S (AMD 790 GX + SB750) motherboard, with 2 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 memory. It was compared to the Intel Core 2 Duo E8200, Core 2 Duo E8400, Core 2 Duo E6420, AMD Phenom X3 8750 and Athlon X2 5200+ (Brisbane), all running at stock speeds.