Advanced Micro Devices said Monday that its upcoming "Zacate" CPU-GPU Fusion chip would outperform an existing Intel Core i5, and offered two demonstrations to prove it.

SAN FRANCISCO--Advanced Micro Devices said Monday that its upcoming "Zacate" CPU-GPU Fusion chip would outperform an existing Intel Core i5, and offered two demonstrations to prove it.

Intel is hosting its Intel Developer Forum here this week, and used Monday to announce its next-generation microprocessor.

AMD's , with the company's mainstream Fusion chip, called "Llano," delayed to 2011 after "challenges" with the 32-nm process used by fab partner GlobalFoundries. But AMD last week said that it would demonstrate that its latest chips could easily top Intel's last-generation parts, the most recent chips that it could stage comparisons with.

AMD staged two demonstrations, both using a comparison between an unspecified Zacate chip with a pair of Bobcat cores, versus a 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5. AMD executives refused to disclose the speeds of the Zacate chip the company was running.

In the first, AMD's Zacate challenged the i5 with the Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 "Pyschedelic Browsing" demo, where the AMD chip beat Intel's offering by an order of magnitude. Next, AMD staged a contest comparing the 2004 NcSoft "City of Heroes" game, simply marching a character around to get the sense of an average frame rate. Although the frame rate varied, the Core i5 version turned out frame rates of about 15 to 20 frames per second, while the Zacate version touched over 30 frames per second.

For his part, Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and co-general manager of Intel Corporation's Intel Architecture Group, showed off Sandy Bridge running "Starcraft 2" in what he said was about the performance of today's discrete microprocessors.

"Ultimately, we find it very interesting that Intel is focusing on graphics, as that's what we've been preaching for two years," said Bob Grimm, for AMD.

While it's likely that AMD will launch the Zacate after the first of the year, Grimm wouldn't disclose a launch date. Executives said to expect more demonstrations and details at AMD's financial analyst day in November.