Before you dwell on the title, let me fling a backdrop of my personal computing experience. My teenage-hood was bombarded with an “Unknown PC” from an Alien Planet which was inferior than our Planet Earth. Hence i asked DAD for a real pc and my uncompromising argument yielded me my first PC with an Intel Pentium 4 chip clocked @1.7GHz on an Intel 850MV motherboard with 2*128MB RD Ram and nVidia Geforce MX2 video card. Yes i was more than happy with the configuration as it was way better than what my friends had back then. Honestly speaking i had no clue about AMD processors and how they fared against Intel chips until i was enlightened about the AMD Athlon 64 processors in early 2004. As it was high time i needed an upgrade i went for AMD Athlon-X2 4200+ on ASUS M2N VM-DH, previously i had seen the advantage of going for AMD processors (socket 939) as Athlon X2 was totally compatible with older motherboards that came with Athlon64 cpu’s and i was impressed with that unlike the Blue team forcing you to upgrade the motherboard if you wanted a new CPU from their turf. So it was sealed and my first AMD A$$ kicking Athlon X2 was chosen for my next PC.

Courtesy: AMD

But the Blue giant wasn’t there to be trampled upon by a dwarf and hit back and in years it hit back hard with Core 2 duo and now the Core i series CPU’s, which are driving the front seat. On the other hand ATI acquisition by AMD was a bitter sweet symphony as it left AMD reeling backwards mainly due to debt. But this dramatic merger finally gave birth to its first offspring i.e, AMD Fusion C & E Series APU’s (Accelerated Processing Units as they call it) designed for netbooks and ultra-low powered notebooks and around 5M+ has already been sold. Now APU’s incorporate a multi-core CPU and a GPU on a single silicon die with an UVD3 video acceleration block found in HD6*** series discrete graphics. In layman words you buy one of these processors and you are good for lite or medium mobile gaming with decent battery backup.

AMD Fusion A Series APU’s codenamed Llano is the deal breaker right now as it is smartly priced among the Core i3′s & i5′s. It is built on a 32nm SOI process with over a billion transistors and integrated graphics that is worth a shot. A 35-45 W TDP processor has twice or thrice GPU muscle than the similarly priced Sandy Bridge laptops. Though the latter processor might outperform the former in regards to single threaded applications. Moreover an added onboard AMD GPU can be used to draw more performance in terms of GPU.

So why do i recommend going for llano over sandy bridge if you are looking for budget laptops?

Courtesy: AMD

Picture this scenario. You invite a friend of yours who has got a evenly priced Sandy Bridged laptop and you have a llanoed laptop. You guys start bragging about your laptops and the other guy shows off by encoding some Blu-Ray’s, CD’s, archiving etc. He ends up shaving a minute or two on a lengthy video while you are not left far behind. Then you guys shift your gear to gaming and that’s when the other bloke gets completely embarrassed as you are getting more than playable frame rates on Modern Warfare 2 with AA enabled hooked to your TV via HDMI and the other guy is cursing the Intel GMA HD 3000.

Conclusion: Blu-ray, H264/DIVX Video Accelerated playback(UVD3), GPU Computing,  HTML5 acceleration, decent battery life (5 Hrs), DirectX 11 competent dual graphics, Budget Gaming, Decent CPU is definitely the way to go