X-bit labs

Dell Sighted Developing AMD Opteron Servers.

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/29/2004 | 02:15 PM ]

A financial analyst said on Tuesday Dell planned to sell its own computers that use processors from Advanced Micro Devices, citing so-called channel checks.

“Based on our channel checks, AMD has finally been able to penetrate Dell with its Opteron processors targeting the server market,” Tai Nguyen, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, wrote in a note sent to clients.

Historically Dell has been using microprocessors only from Intel Corporation. However, with the availability of AMD Athlon processors in 1999 and 2000, rumours about Dell’s presumable intentions to get AMD-based computers on the market became very intense, but the real condition of the things is that there are still no computers from Dell with AMD chips inside. As a major customer of Santa Clara, California-based Intel, Dell reportedly receives some favours from its main chip partner, therefore, this is quite natural for Dell not to use processors from other makers. Moreover, being a company concentrated mostly on corporate and SOHO markets Dell says that the demand for AMD central processing units from its clients is not too strong.

“Our checks indicate that Dell is currently designing two dual-processor servers based on AMD’s Opteron processors,” the analyst indicated.

Both Dell and AMD officials denied the fact of collaboration between the two companies and said that rumours of such kind are pretty frequent to emerge, according to Reuters and The Street.

Earlier this year observers noticed AMD-based computers selling on dell.com web-site, but at that time spokesperson for computer maker said that the machines were offered under a special order from an institution and were not manufactured by Dell itself.

X-bit labs could not immediately reach officials for Dell and AMD for comment.