AMD is taking many steps in order to harness the parallel processing capabilities of CPUs and GPUs to accelerate application performance, Longoria said. The company is providing tools to encourage development of applications using the OpenCL standard, which includes a C-like programming language with APIs (application programming interfaces) that enable parallel task execution across hardware including CPUs and GPUs. Apple, Intel and Nvidia Devices are among the companies promoting OpenCL.

A lot of the high-performance computing community is doing their work based on the OpenCL platform, which could eventually trickle down into general-purpose computing, Longoria said. OpenCL competes with Microsoft, which is promoting its proprietary DirectX parallel programming tools, and Nvidia, which offers the CUDA framework.

AMD is focusing OpenCL platform applications to be written for the FireStream processor, a family of high-performance GPUs. AMD acquired graphics technology when it bought ATI Technologies in 2006.

AMD designs both CPUs and GPUs, giving it a leg up over the world's leading chipmaker Intel, whose CPUs go into close to 80 percent of PCs worldwide. Intel in December unceremoniously delayed its first graphics processor called Larrabee without providing a new release date, leading to speculation that the product had been scrapped.