Well you probably wont experience a heat problem, but the cpu fan is going to run faster and more often to dissipate it and that means more noise and less battery life.
Hotter, higher watt draw cpu's bite you twice that way.
The fan on my laptop hardly ever comes on, and its barely warm to the touch.
On a performance vs watt basis, the pentium dual core and core 2 duo's are without peer. Not only are they more efficient from the get-go, many of the newer chips are on a smaller die than AMD's offerings so they're smaller and more efficient than the last generation dual cores.
Now that battery thing can be offset by using a bigger battery, which means more weight.
So while you can certainly get cheaper (although $469 is pretty dang cheap) you're going to get some tradeoffs...performance, battery life, weight, heat, resale.
As far as AMD...well...I cant say I hold a lot of respect for a business that never had a chance to do anything other than exist for a period of time and reduce the profitability of the market before expiring. Intel's manufacturing efficiency and low costs are an order of magnitude better than anyone else in the semiconductor business. All they had to do was drop the price until AMD went out of business, but they had to become pesky enough and Intel had to be willing to test the antitrust folks again. So basically AMD had no chance and they'll be gone one way or the other by next year.
I had an interesting discussion with some folks a while ago about it. The initial take is that competition is good and brings the best products to the customer at the lowest price more quickly.
Not so fast...
Competition between Microsoft Windows and OS/2 way back when coughed up Windows as a winner. OS/2 was frankly a far better product and was pretty darn similar in terms of capabilities as Windows XP. A very stable product. But windows was a little cheaper and a smaller increment in capabilities and complexity. So people chose the cheaper, lesser option and then suffered with stability issues for ten years.
Competition between Intel and AMD caused Intel management to press forward with the Pentium 4 product line rather than take a little longer and produce what would have been the current Core architecture. So without that competitive pressure you might have had these cool multicore highly efficient processors 6-7 years ago instead of that godawful firebreathing large die, high MHz pentium 4 POS. There were actually several higher speed versions of the pentium 3 that could have eating the early pentium 4's for breakfast, but those were scuttled to make way for the new generation.
Further, when product releases were a little longer between generations, the chip companies and the software companies had a lot of time to make hardware that the software could use to advantage and software that made use of the hardwares features. Remember the old 486 "math coprocessors" that Intel developed with Lotus to make 1-2-3 go 10x faster? Wouldnt it be nice if your applications were making better use of those 2 or 4 processing cores in your new computer? That sort of synergy just doesnt happen when your product releases are 18 months apart instead of 3-4 years. So while we've all paid a little less for our computers and they're bloody fast, the s/w isnt using half of its capabilities most of the time. Not a very good value.
Just think...by 2001 you might have been running a rock solid stable OS/2 operating system loaded with features, on a powerful highly efficient 2 or 4 core chip. Of course, you'd have paid a few hundred extra for the computer and OS.
It'd still be cheaper than a Mac.
But competition fixed that...
