whats the deal with AMDs. im not much of a techie but when looking at specs as i was looking for a new laptop i noticed that AMDs seem to have a smaller cache that intels but a much bigger front side bus, whats the effect of this?

Lots of speculation why AMD seems to be not doing much these days...

Rumor has it they are in the middle of getting bought out, taken-over or something.

AMD took over Ati recently.

They are bringing out the quad core CPUs soon though

They have released the quad-cores, but they are cheating a little, since they utilize two separate CPUs on the same mainboard, and have AMD's new socket type, Socket-F.

Not much point in buying a quad core CPU at the moment though.

Get a conroe.

AMD is coming out with L3 Cache quad core processors. I wonder hows that gona make things faster ?

To the OP, AMD and Intel have such different architecture that individual differences don't mean much. Both perform almost equally well through different means. Though right now Intel's newest Core 2 Duo chips are outperforming AMD, in another 3 months the situation might be reversed. It goes back and forth a lot, in the end which processor you buy is more personal preference than anything else.

I'm a fan of AMD myself, and with their recent acquisition of ATI I expect to see some very interesting technologies in the near future. ATI's R600 chipset is being released soon and that thing will be a monster, probably requiring a second power supply just to run it. I imagine in a year or two we'll start to see joint chipsets from AMD/ATI that optimize performance between the CPU and GPU.

I hope they finally realize that they should use the extra CPU instead of the expensive GPU

Maybe future games could use the second core for physics calculations instead of all this "physics card" crap.