New Latops = Desktop price and power?

    New Laptop technologies have just about totally brought them equal to desktops in price and power in the budget and mid range machine categories.

    Here's a laptop that at $399, seems like the perfect one to send your college freshman to school with.  It is so new that it isn't yet included on the HP website. It uses the new AMD A4-3300M processor. 

    Like all the new PC processors, A series AMD Fusion and 2nd generation Intel I series it uses what AMD calls an APU instead of a mere CPU.  An APU is a main processor chip that eliminates the main support chip by including the CPU and GPU (graphics processor) as well as memory management etc. on a single chip. 

    This makes the 2-3 functions work together radically faster by being tiny fractions of a millimeter apart vs up to inches apart when they are on separate chips. Distance apart = sloth in interaction of chips in an electronic device. This also radically reduces their total power consumption and heat production.

    The result is a 15.6" screen fairly powerful laptop that can run up to 7+ hours on battery. There are other design advances that assist in reaching that efficiency but the APU is the main contributor. Here's a laptop that's a near equivalent machine with an I 3-2310M processor. 

    Of course there is the usual small price difference favoring AMD based computers over rough equivalent Intel based computers.