AMD is working on a brand new x86 CPU core

[Pemalite]

walsufnir said:

It's a market where Intel already has the biggest market share. They keep improving their IGPs but it isn't their main target. Last quarter they already had a market share of 65,1%. To achieve even more they had to do dedicated cards but I doubt they will ever do this. Larrabee ended in Xeon Phi but I doubt this will ever reach normal consumers.

They tried to make dedicated discreet graphics processors, it was a *massive* flop, I introduce you to the AGP Intel i740...



Fact of the matter is, Intel has never been proficient at building graphics hardware, usually just "good enough". - What HAS occured is that AMD raised the "Good enough" bar with it's APU's and Intel has to match or exceed it (Aka. Competition does wonderfull things!), however drivers still leave much to be desired in Intel's camp.
AMD is essentially playing against Intel's weakness.

walsufnir said:

I would want to correct with "and most people not even caring about the difference". People who buy IGPs intentionally (whether AMD or Intel) are not the hardcore gamers, anyway. I don't know about the current state of tech regarding Notebook tech but Intel was intentionally chosen far more often in Notebooks as their designs generally had way better TDP and idle power consumption. IIRC the Turion never had a chance against Centrino based Notebooks and therefore only a few barebones featured AMD tech.

Intel didn't just have lower TDP and power consumption, but they sold an "Entire package" to OEM's which started with Centrino, that's chipset, processor, graphics, controllers, networking etc'.
Which when you're buying and building systems in bulk is a very attractive proposition, this is how Intel got the leg up over AMD in the notebook space.
Prior to that Intel used some pretty bad practices to try and exclude AMD out of the market during AMD's domination period with the Athlon XP and Athlon 64.

Converesly, Intel has MASSIVE marketing budgets, more so than AMD could ever dream of (We are thinking Billions) this throws another consumer-recognizable name onto the face of a notebook to help shift hardware.

rolltide101x said:

AMD notebooks tend to have a longer battery life than Intel ones from my experience. I do not know the facts though. I think anyone would take an A4 over a Centrino if they knew the differences. It is the AMD E-series that is really bad.

No they don't.

AMD processors tend to be hotter, more power hungry and slower in almost every segment, this is slowly changing however.
Intel had low-powered states before AMD (Where it will reduce the clockspeeds and/or voltages.), power gating where it will completely shut-off parts of the chip, heck even dynamically-powered caches where chunks of say... The L2 cache will be turned off in order to conserve energy.
Intel is also much farther ahead in lithography, which helps with various power characteristics.

Plus Intel processors are significantly faster, if you are doing *any* kind of processing... The sooner you can get the data processed, the sooner the processor can return to idle and consume a very tiny amount of energy, again, because of Intels CPU advantage, this also benefits power consumption.

There is also more to power consumption than the CPU too, chipsets, display, connectivity, various controllers all consume energy, for instance when Intel introduced the Intel Atom, they essentially just re-used a hot and old power hungry chipset that was a few nodes behind on the CPU's lithography, the result was the Chipset consumed almost as much energy as the processor itself, thus the first-gen Atom's tend to be power hogs because of it.

walsufnir said:

 The inability to upgrade them was planned years ago (I think MXM interface it was called) but as I quit gaming on PC severaly ago, too, I didn't follow the stuff like I did before I quit.

MXM and AXIOM. :P