X-bit labs

Dell CEO: "My Guess is We Are Going to Want to Add that AMD Product Line…".

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/15/2004 | 02:30 PM ]

One of a few companies who do not use microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices, Dell Inc., said it had been considering AMD’s chips for gaming, workstation and server computers and was likely to add appropriate product lineup into its family of systems, however, remains tight-lipped over any details for such plans.

“My guess is we’re going to want to add that [AMD] product line in the future…They’ve been getting better and better. The technology is better. In some areas they’re now in the lead on Intel. That is what is interesting us more than anything,” said Kevin Rollins, Dell’s CEO in an interview with InfoWorld web-site.

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 once said that the demand for AMD central processing units from its clients is not too strong. Now the company cites AMD’s inability to supply the PC giant enough chips for desktops and believes it is more likely to deploy AMD’s chips into server, workstation and gaming desktop spaces.

“If we basically sucked up all of AMD’s [manufacturing] capacity it would not be enough. They don’t have enough capacity for us to use them on the desktop. For us, fundamentally, AMD is much more interesting in the server, workstation or gaming arenas,” Mr. Rollins explained.

Some analysts believe that all of Dell’s comments in regards adoption of central processing units from AMD are aimed mostly to win more concessions from Intel Corp.. Given that Dell discloses no details about its computers with AMD processors inside, such opinion is only fueled more and more.

AMD has inked deals with companies like IBM, Sun, HP and Gateway and a number of others so far.