One of the highlights of AMD's Hawaii event last month was the introduction of AMD Mantle, a new, close-to-metal API that would supposedly unlock huge additional performance and address many of the issues that plague DirectX.

Intel, AMD and ARM are looking to address new workloads fueled by such trends as cloud computing, mobility, big data and social networks.

Advanced Micro Devices hopes for financial stability after years of struggles, but analysts said that a volatile PC market could derail the chip designer's progress.

AMD plans to sample its first ARM-based processors for servers early next year, alongside paired CPUs and integrated graphics cores in an attempt to oust Intel's Xeon from its dominance in the server market.