Ok, now I am back home. I would say that an AMD N950 up to N970 CPUs should give equal or better performance compared to Intel i3 380M or i3 2310M - In highly multithreaded environments, such as running WCG on all cores...

But then, considering it is a laptop, you will probably want longer battery life, less noise and less power consumption? In that case I would favor Intel 2310M and its 32nm process and 35W TDP...

Also, it depends on your budget, but since you said i3 vs amd x4 I chose these. If you go higher on the Intel side than i3 (for instance i5 2520M or 2410M), then AMD has nothing to up up against it, yet. That may well change though as AMD soon will release its Bulldozer architecture at 32nm.

So, consider budget and how soon you need it (buldozer may be worthwhile since AMD often has lower price on cpus than intel).

Thanks for answering flodisar. As far as specific laptop model's go, I'm not sure yet as the local stores here are all having “back to school” sales with a vast amount of models & specs changing weekly.

That's good information that an i5, or an upcoming AMD Bulldozer chip might be worth holding out for. My old Toshiba laptop is still hanging in for now but has a dead battery and a power cord glued into it that will completely disintegrate next time I knock into it!

Well, I'm better prepared now, if I have to get one sooner rather than later.

Glad I could help :)

Good news and thanks !!

Now New Alloy Can Convert Heat Directly Into Electricity

Thanks for letting us know the outcome, okmrbh!

I'll be interested to hear how the AMD 3400m does with crunching. I believe that's a Llano chip, right? -- quadcore CPU with the GPU on the same chip? It should be a really nice all-around machine for the money and the power consumption.