AMD showcased its upcoming "Trinity" mobile chips for ultrabooks at CES, which the company claims will be cheaper but than Intel's offerings.

AMD said that the new chips draw around 17 watts of power, which is close to the TDP of Intel's Ivy Bridge chips for ultrabooks.

Laptops based on Trinity will be released later this year, whth prices starrting from $500 or lower. That compares favorably to Intel's ultrabooks, which are currently priced starting at $800, though Intel hopes to bring that down by the year end.

AMD hopes that its new chips will offer a better value for money compared to Intel's offerings.

The Trinity chips will come in dual-core and quad-core options. Theey will deliver the same performance but consume half the power of AMD's A-series chips, code-named Llano. AMD says that Trinity will consume the same amount of power but outperform the current AMD E-series and C-series chips used in ultrathin laptops.

AMD will also release a version of Trinity for standard-sized laptops. The chips will be 50 percent faster on graphics and 25 percent faster on CPU performance, according to AMD.

The Trinity chip combines an x86 CPU and graphics processor made using the 32-nanometer process. The CPU cores are based on a new architecture called Piledriver, and the integrated graphics processor will support Microsoft's DirectX 11 graphics technology.

At CES, AMD demonstrated a laptop that played Dirt 3 video game in DirectX 11 mode in one monitor and converted videos using Arcsoft MediaConverter on two other displays.