Any win is important to AMD right now, even if they are just PCs and not tablets, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

"They are positioning Hondo as a solution between ARM and Atom and Core for mid-priced productivity tablets, which is a difficult position. Even if the segment will exist, it is not clear what price band it would occupy," McGregor said.

The Hondo chip will run at a clock speed of 1GHz and draw 4.5 watts of power, according to product slides from AMD. The chip will have 80 integrated Radeon graphics processor cores, which will give tablets high-definition video and gaming capabilities. The Radeon graphics core will support DirectX 11 and have the capability to support fill high-definition 1080p displays. Many tablets today have 1366-by-768 or 1280-by-800-pixel resolution displays.

A Windows 8 tablet with the Z-60 will provide 10 hours of battery life on a single battery charge, eight hours of web continuous browsing, and six hours of 720p video, according to AMD's benchmarks. A tablet will boot up Windows 8 in 25 seconds and resume from sleep in just two seconds. The chip is based on the CPU core code-named Bobcat, which is also used in AMD's low-power C-series and E-series netbook chips.

Intel has made an Atom chip code-named Clover Trail for tablets, which will also offer 10 hours of battery life. AMD said that existing applications will work with its chips. Existing Windows applications will not work with ARM-based tablets with Windows RT, like with Intel's Clover Trail chip.