Asked how Fusion will square up against Sandy Bridge, Meyer insisted that Fusion does more than merely combine a CPU and a GPU on a single chip. Developers will be able to write programs that can allocate tasks to the GPU or CPU, depending on which will be most energy-efficient, he said.

The company will need to ensure software developers have the tools they need to take advantage of Fusion, however, including a development framework, software libraries and debuggers, said Chekib Akrout, general manager of AMD's Technology Group.

To exploit the CPU-GPU architecture, developers will need to "slice applications into threads" and direct those threads to whichever processing engine is most suitable, he said -- the GPU for parallel-type queries and the CPU for sequential tasks.

Developers "need to be able to code at the C level and not have to be aware of all the intricacies" of the architecture underneath, he said.

Other chips discussed Wednesday that are due in the first half of next year include: