Why AMD's notebook prospects are looking up

Why AMD's notebook prospects are looking up
The first quarter of 2010 saw the dawn of a new acronym and the start of a major shift in the PC hardware market—the move from integrated graphics processors to integrated processor graphics. In the former, the GPU is integrated into the chipset's northbridge, while in the latter, the CPU is in the same package or on the same die as the processor (e.g., Intel's Clarksdale and Arrandale 32nm parts, with in-package GPUs).
AMD doesn't have an IPG offering yet, but it doesn't yet need one. The thing that's making AMD attractive, apart from price (and price is a major factor), is that Intel's IPG just isn't that great. It's a lot better than it once was, but it's still no match for IGPs from NVIDIA or AMD.
The problem with having a not-so-great GPU in the same package as the processor die is that if you want to buy Intel's latest and greatest mobile CPU, you have to buy its GPU along with it. So you have to pay for this GPU that isn't very good and that you may not want, and then if you want real graphics performance you have to then go out and pay for an NVIDIA GPU to go with it (via Optimus or Apple's proprietary solution).
NVIDIA's Optimus is definitely a win-win for Intel, NVIDIA, and Intel users, because it gives Intel's customers the option of a better GPU that and a platform that can dynamically optimize its graphics performance to fit the running workload. But if you stack it up against a traditional CPU + IGP combination, like that which AMD offers, it's hard to imagine that all that all the shuffling graphics data back and forth between the GPU's private pool of DDR3 and the framebuffer that sits in system memory doesn't burn extra power.