Advanced Micro Devices has accelerated shipping dates of their A-series Accelelerated Processing Unit chips designed to go head-to-head with Intel's Sandybridge processors and AMD has released videos of the new APUs outperforming the best from Intel.

Codenamed Llano, the new AMD chips are manufactured with the same 32 nanometer technology at Sandybridge, contains about the same number of transistors, and both have integrated graphics processors. The intel CPUs are seen to offer better performance in the main CPU while AMD's Llano is said to be faster and more adept at handling video and gameplay with its faster graphics engine.

According to Godfrey Cheng, AMD's director of Client Technology, Llano was designed on the following hypothesis: "People are using more modern workloads like 3D graphics, HD video and Internet surfing in a much more prevalent manner...we all dabble with spreadsheets and word processing...but any modern x86 CPU-based PC can handle these workloads with ease. But with these modern applications, the capacity to multitask, improve image quality and enhance power efficiency are much more important than raw x86 performance in determining how good a consumer's experience is with a particular PC."

When can consumers expect to see Llano-based notebooks? Thomas Seifert, AMD's chief financial officer and interim CEO seemed confident such products would hit the market before the end of June.

Previously, the first Llano chips hadn't been expected to ship until July. The desktop version of the APU is still evidently slated to be released in that timeframe.

The desktop version of Llano, which includes nearly a dozen dual-core and quad-core APU products, is expected to ship in the third and fourth quarters of 2011, with July 20 pegged in leaked roadmap documents as the release date for the first five parts.

AMD lost market share to Intel in the fourth quarter last year, according to an IDC study released in February. Intel had an 80.8 percent processor market share, compared to 80.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009. AMD's market share was 18.9 percent, declining from a 19.5 percent share the previous year.

Graphics chips are being increasingly used in high-performance systems for parallel execution of some scientific, math and video applications. But many programs for desktop operating systems like Windows have been written for processing on multicore CPUs.