AMD Sale to Dell Rumored

An anonymous reader writes "Advanced Micro Devices may be up for sale. AMD's shares were significantly up yesterday, apparently on rumors that Dell is interested in buying the American multinational semiconductor company. If AMD ends up being bought out, the purchase by Dell, or any other company for that matter, would be among the biggest the technology industry has seen. It would be of course bigger than when AMD bought ATI in 2006."

Comments

Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[intellitech]

Is Dell considering making a more integrated kind of product line? Talk about a change in strategy.

And a damn good one it would be. I can't even begin to imagine the profits Dell could reap through the fruits inherited from an AMD buyout. It's much cheaper to manufacture products when you control every aspect of most of the primary components being used. And then also manufacturing facilities.. well, even more so.. wow.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[WrongSizeGlass]

Maybe yes, maybe no. The big loser in this would be Intel. I'm not sure of the % of Dell computers that ship with AMD CPU's but it's certainly less than 25%. Dell is big enough to hurt Intel if they switch to AMD.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a more useful strategy for Dell would be to improve customer satisfaction. They could start with quality control.

If Dell took over AMD, then within a year I probably won't be buying AMD chips, just based on lack of quality.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Desler]

You do realize that most of Dell's revenue stream is propped up by money given to them from Intel? If anything, dropping Intel is going to mean Dell is going to lose even more money in net income.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[0123456]

Dell is big enough to hurt Intel if they switch to AMD.

Considering Intel's CPUs beat AMD on pretty much every measure other than price, Intel could really hurt Dell if they switch to AMD. Nvidia would be far more likely to suffer if Dell only sold ATI cards in their gaming systems.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[sanosuke001]

AMD's net income was 471 million and Dell's net income was 1.4 billion; I have no idea where you get your information...

Add this to the fact that using their own product to build all their systems would save them quite a bit on every CPU and video card they bundle in a sold system means that this could be a big deal for Dell.

Now, all that aside, I don't know how I feel about Dell owning AMD/ATI. However, it could push AMD into more marketshare which means more R&D and as long as Dell still sells wholesale, too, it might not be so bad.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[i_ate_god]

So Dell will become the PC equivalent of Apple?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Dell is about buying cheap components, and screwing them together to make profitable PCs, and the like. AMD is about baking chips. I'm not sure if Dell's experience and success with PCs will guarantee that they are a good chip baker. Well, maybe if Dell can convince AMD's top management and techies to stay, and Dell leaves the whole operation alone, and doesn't try to fiddle with it too much. Just my take.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[altoz]

Let's see. HP has a WebOS PC coming out. Dell buys AMD...

My guess is they're both moving towards Apple's model. Could a real Dell-customized Linux desktop be far off?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[MachineShedFred]

No, because they're still under Microsoft's thumb as a Windows licensor.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to investors having zero foresight during the cashflow saga last year, AMD had to spin off manufacturing. It became Global Foundries, a 50-50 split with the Advanced Technology Investment Co. (basically, the Abu Dhabi govt).

So nowadays, AMD is losing grip on manufacturing. Their IP is definitely worth buying out however, in the same way as owning the fabless ARM Holdings would be.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[hierofalcon]

The manufacturing facilities were spun off to Global Foundries. The last report I saw said they had dropped their stake in the manufacturing side from 30 to 14%.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Nadaka]

Every measure but price? ok...
They certainly use less energy for the performance.
They certainly have higher maximum performance at the top end.

AMD CPU's on the other hand beat most Intel models on price/performance and match Intel's best values (i7 920 and i5 750 last I checked).
What that means is that at almost any given price point, the AMD chip is better than the Intel chip with only a few cases where they are equal.

The only two reasons to buy intel are if you need to use less power or if you want the heavy lifting of a thousand dollar cpu for intense computation or benchmark ego masturbation.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Pharmboy]

No, Apple did the exact opposite: Dropped developing their own CPU/MB combos in favor of something that Intel offers and designs for them.

If you look only at Mac computers, and not the iphone, itouch, iwhatever, then Apple is a company that *designs* computers and has created and maintains a popular operating system. They don't actually build the gooey innards for their boxes, ATI (AMD), and Intel do, as well as other parts suppliers.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to remember that AMD spun off it's manufacturing division a while back. The purchase of AMD would just be the technology it's self not the manufacturing.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[marcosdumay]

The idea is that Dell would use the new ability to design everything on their systems to reduce the cost of manufacturing, thus not losing 1.3 bilion a year.

I doubt they can do that, but hey, who am I? I don't see value even on the Nokia sellout for Microsoft.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

$ per computing unit per watt

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

the performance/price ratio is one of the most important.

what's the point of a cpu 1% faster when it costs 50% more? (exaggerating for getting the point across)

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[alen]

maybe on no profit consumer computers, but on servers Intel rules. Xeons are 32nm, faster in most cases, better power efficiency and by the time you price out the server the cost is the same or less than AMD based servers.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[0123456]

What that means is that at almost any given price point, the AMD chip is better than the Intel chip with only a few cases where they are equal.

Which is what I said.

If you want the fastest CPU, you buy Intel. If you want the lowest power consumption for the performance, you buy Intel (or ARM, at the very low end). If you want cheap, you buy AMD.

If Dell switched to only selling AMD CPUs, they'd lose all the markets other than the low end... which is where the profit margins are usually the worst.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[RatherBeAnonymous]

If the rumor is true, I think it would be more like a move towards IBM's business model. With AMD under the Dell umbrella, Dell could make a major play into big iron.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Migala77]

Maybe yes, maybe no. The big loser in this would be Intel. I'm not sure of the % of Dell computers that ship with AMD CPU's but it's certainly less than 25%. Dell is big enough to hurt Intel if they switch to AMD.

More likely good news for Intel. Fair chance all of Dell's competitors will switch from AMD to Intel where possible, just so Dell won't profit from their business. And you have to wonder if Dell's customers will just happily go along with AMD instead of Intel. If this happens, it could cost both Dell and AMD customers.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple don't own the fundamental pieces of their desktop hardware. Sure they have their own licensed version of ARM for their iDevices, but owning (ok, under) half of the x86 market would catapult a company farther than having a strictly licensed OS bundling strategy like Apple.

Apple are subject to the market pressures of buying CPUs from Intel. AMDell could avoid* the negotiations and sales margin.

*IANAL or in the US - is there some sort of competition/antitrust issue that would be raised?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

AMD CPU's on the other hand beat most Intel models on price/performance and match Intel's best values (i7 920 and i5 750 last I checked).

Except that they aren't current intel chips.

The latest benchmarks I saw showed that the Core i3 2100 was roughly as fast as the Phenom II X6 1100T. That's intel's slowest current generation desktop chip, at $100, as fast as AMD's fastest current generation desktop chip.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[anti-human 1]

And clearly, that would have been impossible to link to, or even mutter a possible source.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[0123456]

what's the point of a cpu 1% faster when it costs 50% more? (exaggerating for getting the point across)

Exagerating to pointlessness. No sane person would pay 50% more for a CPU that's 1% faster, but the real world is more like 50-100% more for a CPU that's 50% faster... and a lot of people will pay that.

AMD's profits suck because they're forced to sell complex and expensive CPUs cheap because they can't compete on performance. Intel sell far more CPUs and make far more money because they own the high end of the market and the very low end of the market and compete well in the middle.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[MonsterTrimble]

I wouldn't be so sure of that. It's either Dell did the math and they will make more money owning AMD & ATI then being paid by Intel or they are using AMD to leverage more cash out of Intel. Frankly, I like the idea of owning AMD more likely, just for the vertical integration aspect. I would trade a little less profitability in the short term for something like that.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[mozumder]

At this point, AMD doesn't have any manufacturing facilities. They are a design show now.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[lp_bugman]

It be awful; Will be very difficult for competitors to differentiate from AMD by using their same CPU's. Most likely the all will switch to something else (only real alternative is Intel).
Dell also is known for their little R&D and overall cheap products; witch is also not good if you want bleeding edge AMD preprocessors.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[petermgreen]

AMD spun off their manufacturing facilities to stave off bankruptcy.

Personally if this is true I would think it is a strategic purchase. Even if dell has to subsidise AMD that may be a better option than letting intel drive them to bankrupcy and take a monopoly.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[LordLimecat]

You may want to recheck those benchmarks. Just googled "core i3 2100 vs phenom", this was the first review I found:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/16

Second page shows the Phenom roundly trouncing the i3 in a large number of tests, and besting a number of the i7s. There were a few tests where the i3 was slightly superior, most others the phenom was 15-20% faster, and in some cases 50+% faster. Look at the encoding performance, the AMD slaughters the i3.

And from what I can see, the i3 is closer to $150, with its AMD equivalent-- the X2 645-- being closer to $120. On most benchmarks they are rather close to each other, but the AMD is a whopping 20% cheaper. Things arent quite what youre making them out to be.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[eepok]

I considered such ratios when building my latest low-power machine... until I figured out that with the focus of "low-power", most of the time, it's just a wattage ceiling that I need, not a strong ratio. Once I realized that, it was just a filtering job of:

hide all processors over 65w
hide all processors with one core
hide all processors over $125 (I'm a budget builder)

Within that group, find the best relative computing power.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

Here

As was obvious from the start, the i3 gets beaten in the multithreaded tasks, but it offsets that by handing the X6 it's ass in the single threaded ones, so the two end up pretty much equal.

Alternatively, if you don't buy that, try the i5 2500 which wins in all but 3 tests and still costs significantly less.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Pulzar]

The latest benchmarks I saw showed that the Core i3 2100 was roughly as fast as the Phenom II X6 1100T.

If by "roughly as fast" you mean about 50% slower, then, yeah.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

The flip side is how many other computer makers want to buy parts from a competitor? What will be the market for AMD chips if HP and others don't want to buy from Dell? Would AMD chips be as cheap (even internal pricing) for Dell if they lose half (or more) of the market for AMD chips and have to scale back production while still paying all the overhead costs associated with owning a lot of capacity?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

Notably the test you linked only covers the absolute worst case for the i3. If you look at this (from the same site) which covers a much wider range of benchmarks, you see the i3 wins as many as it loses, and by similar margins – i.e. it's roughly equal.

If that doesn't satisfy you though, you may want to step up to the i5 2500, which is still significantly cheeper than the phenom, and beats it in all but 3 tests.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[obarthelemy]

Looking at probably independent sites (the tech report, tom's...), you have to get fairly high in the end for Intel platforms (ie, CPU+Chipset+motherboard) to be cost-competitive at a given level of performance, at that's for PCs heavily skewed towards the Gamer and Enthusiast market.

My feeling is AMD is competitive all the way up to, but excluding, the 5-10% of the market that can be called "high-end". They have OK and cheaper CPUs, better IGPs, cheaper MBs with about the same features.

The cheapest M-ATX AM3 board is 50 euros, the 1156 is 85. A cheap dual-core to plug into that is 55€ (AMD) or 90€ (Intel] (source: www.materiel.net). That's 70€ extra for a comparable Intel build. Adding 500 GB disk, 4GB RAM, KBMS and case is about 40 +40 + 20 + 60 = 160€, so Intel works out a quarter more expensive (335-265=70, 70/265= 26%). That's significant.

If you go a bit more high-end, with a Gigabyte board, and a quad core, there's still a 20€ difference on the boards, and ... 100€ difference on the cheapest quad-cores. Enough to buy a second display, a huge hard drive...

My concern would be more about what being a Dell subsidiary might do to AMD: lost OEMs, maybe lost focus...

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[mitgib]

Dell will be more like Packard Bell, irrelevant.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ElectricTurtle]

Lies. Cheapest core i3 2100 is ~$140, and you'd have to be buying from some potentially unreliable outlet at that, and in no way is its performance equivalent to a Phenom 2 X6 1100T. Look at some real bench aggregates, fanboi. You'll see it can outperform an i7-920 in many applications for fully half the cost. Even though it's a bit slower in games, is 5-10% more speed worth 200% the price? Not to most people.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

the i7-920 is unfortunately for you (fanboy) a previous generation i7, and slower than the i5-2500, and even the i3-2100 in dual/single threaded (read games) tasks.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[saleenS281]

They won't own any manufacturing facilities (I'm assuming you're talking about owning CPU FAB's). AMD spun off all their foundries into another company: Global Foundries. While they do maintain a 34% share of the newly formed company, it's not the same as Intel "owning" their own fabs.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[SeeManRun]

Why do you think this would mean they wouldn't use Intel anymore? Intel is not allowed to prevent Dell from buying their processors; if they owned AMD they can still sell Intel CPU's. Would almost certainly be for different markets, and likely the Brazos stuff specifically.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Luckyo]

Which is what I said.

If you want the fastest CPU, you buy Intel. If you want the lowest power consumption for the performance, you buy Intel (or ARM, at the very low end). If you want cheap, you buy AMD.

If Dell switched to only selling AMD CPUs, they'd lose all the markets other than the low end... which is where the profit margins are usually the worst.

Do you understand that vast majority of the market in PCs is not:

1. Low power consumption market
2. High end market.

These two are small niches. Most machines in office space and homes are bought because they are:

a. Cheap.
b. Supported by vendor on a good warranty plan.

If dell can take all the markets by the two above by storm with this fusion, intel is going to suffer greatly. While the big profits are reaped on high end and low power, the real revenue stream is in the middle. AMD is hands down better in this segment then Intel in the most important aspect - efficiency (as in money paid per performance gained). Neither average home users nor corps give a rat's ass what CPU or motherboard are in that "magical box" that is a PC tower. They care that it's cheap, on a good warranty and does the job.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Zorpheus]

If Dell is using only AMT and ATI components from now on, this will already increase the profit of AMD a lot.
Some other PC manufacturers might stop using AMD though.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right, They will ship the chips to their pc builders in individual boxes, thus negating any potential profits.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only market Intel dominates is the high end. AMD undercuts Intel on every other level of performance/price.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all: wow, that's cool. Second: got any links to anyone actually selling that chip, and for $100? Newegg sure doesn't. If you look at the only Core i3s newegg has and compare them to similarly priced Phenoms, they lose (but by a lot less than I thought, I'll admit!).

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[JamesP]

Considering the average intelligence of higher levels of management, if Dell buys AMD it's probably going o keep buying chips only from Intel

Unfortunately, I'm not kidding

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ElectricTurtle]

You already lied about the price by no less than 40%, you're probably lying about your unsourced benchmarks.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

Try reading the thread rather than spamming out dups of other people's comments and you'll see the sources for the benchmarks ;)

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ElectricTurtle]

Yeah, sorry if I don't refresh the thread a thousand times a minute like you apparently do. When I start a comment I write it until I finish it, and being at work sometimes that process is not continuous.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell is about buying cheap components, and screwing them together to make profitable PCs, and the like. AMD is about baking chips. I'm not sure if Dell's experience and success with PCs will guarantee that they are a good chip baker. Well, maybe if Dell can convince AMD's top management and techies to stay, and Dell leaves the whole operation alone, and doesn't try to fiddle with it too much. Just my take.

AMD doesn't "bake chips". They are fabless.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[h4rr4r]

Now add in the cost of the Mobo.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good, arguing over benchmarks. That's what I've been missing for the last five years. (Grumble, no italics on /., grumble...)

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apropos-of-nothiing Linux guy! Welcome back.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ultranova]

The big loser in this would be Intel.

The big loser in this would be all of us. Removing AMD as a competitor for both Intel and NVidia would slow the development of top-end CPUs and GPUs both, and make them more expensive. It's not like Dell is going to invest in further R&D, seeing how they make their profits by peddling cheap shit - or, if we're kind, mid-range market.

Without AMD, we wouldn't even have 64-bit computers now. Intel's IA-64 wasn't backwards compatible - well, early models could run x86 code, but the support was dropped when it turned out that a software emulator was faster - and also required very high-end compilers for efficient code, thus becoming a market failure. With AMD eliminated and its carcass repurposed to produce cheap processors for Dell, who's going to keep Intel from getting lazy? And with ATI similarly eliminated as a serious competitor for NVidia, what's going to keep progress going?

I'm not that young anymore, I need a superhuman computer to upload my mind to within the next hundred years !-) Preferably one that could rewrite Slashdot HTML on the fly to nullify the latest changes. Sure, Greasemonkey can do that, but it requires manually updating the script whenever the latest "update" hits the site.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[h4rr4r]

Please provide some links. I will make it easy for you. Phenom 965 black, which retails at $160 and a very nice mobo is $100. So your challenge is to find a CPU + mobo that gives 50%-100% performance increase for only a 50% increase in price including mobo.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[poetmatt]

I doubt they can do that, but hey, who am I? I don't see value even on the Nokia sellout for Microsoft.

Neither do the shareholders, and thus the stock has tanked.

AMD is on the up because of value, but AMD being owned by dell would be the death of AMD. Dell isn't really an R&D focused company, to take on AMD (a company that requires R&D) would be a horrific incident, to say the least. This is like when bankers tried to take on Chrysler, and had no idea how to run a car business.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[darjen]

The only two reasons to buy intel are if you need to use less power or if you want the heavy lifting of a thousand dollar cpu for intense computation or benchmark ego masturbation.

Or if you enjoy Mac software or intend to develop iOS apps.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[bhtooefr]

ARM, for one.

(And, before you say, "what about x86 compatibility?" Keep in mind that Microsoft is trying to solve that, too, by making everything .NET. Do it for long enough, and x86 becomes unnecessary.)

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

No italics?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Rudeboy777]

For Sandy bridge (and the last gen Westmere too for that matter), the motherboard cost is a wash between Intel and AMD.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[h4rr4r]

Unless maybe you needs lots of cpus. Intel still does not have a 12 core CPU. 4 x 12 core, gives 48 cpus, which is great for virtual desktops and dbs. Both places where you need more CPUs rather than fast ones.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[evilbessie]

Well IBM, HP, Oracle, Cisco are all big vertically integrated businesses, HP is much better at attracting corporate business, Sony and Apple have the high end consumer machines sewn up and Acer, Asus, Lenovo etc are competing with Dell on the lower end. I'm not surprised this is being mentioned as Dell have gone from number 1 supplier of x86 machines to 3 or 4 and see the big 4 doing the whole integration thing and that really doesn't leave Dell anywhere. They don't have the best in really any field, they do need to change something to get back to where they were.

Not sure if this will go anywhere but Dell do need to pull something out the bag or they are going to be an also ran.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that it matters to me, but I don't think you're reading http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/289?vs=203 correctly. In fairness, the page is badly done.

Yes, there are a few synthetic benchmarks at the top which give the i3 an edge by 5-15%. There is also (at the bottom) a benchmark of power consumption which heavily favors the i3. And yes, there are a couple ties.

However, the other ~30 benchmarks favor the Phenom -- frequently by 20-30%. But it's hard to see this just by skimming: for every single benchmark, you have to read the unit of measure (e.g. "total time - lower is better" or "effective rate - higher is better"). If you aren't extremely careful about reading the units of measure, then you'll walk away thinking that the i3 and Phenom frequently trade positions -- in reality, the Phenom consistently beats the i3, but the chart is badly prepared.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[jgagnon]

Maybe Intel is donating a few billion to Dell for them to buy AMD... best use of R&D funds for Intel, ever. :p

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Half the cost? An i7-930 is $280. The 1100T is $240. Very similar and the i7 is faster despite having less cores (in other words a single i7 core utterly destroys a single 1100T core).

Plus Intel chipsets are way better than that AMD crap so you get better motherboards.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Kjella]

It's almost no point in looking at prices, almost all the cost is in the R&D and the price is determined pretty much only by the consumers and the competition. What matters for the long term survivability are the margins and if they're big enough to fund future R&D. Otherwise Intel will very soon be putting out chips that are faster, cheaper and lower power at prices AMD can't turn a profit at all.

The only reason Intel doesn't stomp AMD out of the market (except anti-trust) is because dropping their prices that low would hurt their profits. Even when AMD does their design better than Intel like when they were doing Netburst and Itanic then the huge lead time and investment cost means AMD can't swoop in and take the market. They would have to bet billions up front in plants and capacity on the belief that Fusion will be a killer, if it does only average or if Intel pulls a similar ace out of the hole then AMD is done for.

I think AMD would only be "used up" by Dell. Put in computers as long as they're profitable to produce without much R&D, then end up with an outdated technology that's not worth producing.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[h4rr4r]

You can get mid range AM3 boards for $80, The cheapest 1366 board is twice that.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[0123456]

Without AMD, we wouldn't even have 64-bit computers now.

Uh, I was using 64-bit computers years before AMD started making Athlon-64s.

And Intel was probably right that we should have thrown away the x86 architecture and built a new 64-bit line without the baggage that AMD dragged with it. They were just wrong about Itanic being the way to do that.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[sustik]

> If you want the lowest power consumption for the performance, you buy Intel[...]

On newegg I see the following desktop processors:

35W:

Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L 1.8GHz 512KB L2 Cache LGA 775 35W Single-Core Processor BX80557430 $43

45W:

AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core Processor SDX140HBGQBOX
1MB L2 Cache $38

AMD Sempron LE-1250 Sparta 2.2GHz Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor SDH1250IAA4DP 512KB L2 Cache $30

AMD Athlon II X3 400e Rana 2.2GHz Socket AM3 45W Triple-Core Processor AD400EHDGIBOX
3x512KB L2 Cache $100 (Currently out of stock.)

AMD Athlon II X4 610e Propus 2.4GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 45W Quad-Core Desktop Processor AD610EHDGMBOX $140 (Currently out of stock.)

Saying that Intel wins in low power appears to be too broad a statement.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ADRA]

Why does every move in the computer space have to relate in some way to Apple? I think too many of the people reading these articles have blinders on from the market at large.

For no other reason, a Dell/AMD offering cuts margins on the floor which is a huge cost savings for the systems integration side of the business. Secondly, being in the same company means that Dell can exercise some control over the direction of their R&D/production so that they make better components for Dell designed systems.

This also gives Dell a good chunk of IP which would in some ways insulate them from a slew of patent holding competitors which could be edging into their business. With dell moving into mobile, this could be one avenue for bolstering their portfolio in the litigation heavy mobile space.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ooshna]

Most businesses and regular jack offs don't know or care what the little Intel inside sticker is for.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ProppaT]

I'm curious about the anti-trust aspects of this. There's no problem making your own CPUs, the issue comes when you make them and sell them to others and set prices for your competitors.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Compuser]

Based on my reading of the benchmarks (esp. the POVray benchmark which is a decent measure of multitasking performance) I would equate X6 with core i7 940.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Nethemas the Great]

Further, if you actually look at the Dell product line up they don't really sell anything, business or consumer that's bleeding edge with respect to performance if you exclude the Alienware niche line. As an end-user of AMD products I'm troubled by the potentials for the consumption of AMD by Dell. Dell however certainly stands to gain a great deal from it by eliminating the middleman.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

What that means is that at almost any given price point, the AMD chip is better than the Intel chip with only a few cases where they are equal

Which is what I said.

That is not at all what you said.

If you want the fastest CPU, you buy Intel. If you want the lowest power consumption for the performance, you buy Intel (or ARM, at the very low end). If you want cheap, you buy AMD.

No that is not at all what you said, and when you repeated yourself again you failed to grok what Nadaka said. Yes the fastest Intel chips are faster than the fastest AMD chip. Big deal, almost no one actually buys the very fastest chip on the market. Now since both AMD and Intel have soooo many different chips in their product lines, how does one choose which two chips to compare? I say you compare the $150 AMD chip to the $150 Intel chip. In that basic case AMD almost always wins out.

Here is the distinction, we aren't comparing price we are comparing bang for the buck. So If I have X dollars to spend on a pc build and I want the fastest PC, I'll almost always go with AMD (all other things being equal) since my buck buys more bang. So to us mere mortals who live and operate within a budget, it makes the AMD chips the fastest except at the very top end.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[BitZtream]

The could have done so, and included a non-shitty x86 core in the interrium for backwards compatibility while everyone was transitioned to new code.

They didn't. The started over breaking compat, then didn't provide a decent emulation path for old software. To top it off, IA-64 isn't even a little bit impressive compared to what could do by just scaling technology from 20 years ago to modern production plants and lithography.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, my reality proves your "Dell makes cheap products" completely false. Where I work I maintain about 120 desktop/laptops and out of that over 80% are Dell machines. The hardware failure rate for the Dells are significantly less than the other systems that are non-Dell. If you want cheap systems, buy a Toshiba or HP system.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[nabsltd]

The latest Intel chips use the 1155 socket, and motherboards start in about the $100 range, although they are hard to find right now, due to the SATA hardware bug. Look for them by the middle of next month and you'll see that the price is competetive with AMD. You can also get 1156 motherboards as low as $65, and the CPUs are reasonably competitive on price/peformance with AMD.

The only real advantage AMD has is that if you already have an AM3 motherboard, you can generally drop in a new chip with just a BIOS upgrade. For a completely new system, it's pretty much a wash on the price between Intel and AMD at the same performance level.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that is the opposite that we have experienced. Dell's value ram in our 1000+ machines has a gross failure issue. Also, the notebooks are real cheaply make compared to my HPs.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[h4rr4r]

Really?
I have been trying to compare this recently. I own a Q8300 based machine for my living room, so no anti-intel bigot here, and am looking to replace an aging desktop but can't find any intel stuff that seems to compete at my price point. For comparison I am looking at a phenom 965 black, ~$160. I am planning on spending about $100 on the mobo. So for ~$250 I want the best quad core setup I can get, no matter who makes it. Before you ask, having 4 cores is more important in what I will use them for than having the best single core performance.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ultranova]

Uh, I was using 64-bit computers years before AMD started making Athlon-64s.

And I'm using one as a desktop right now. Sure, they existed before, but AMD began the march to the desktop.

And Intel was probably right that we should have thrown away the x86 architecture and built a new 64-bit line without the baggage that AMD dragged with it.

And replaced that baggage with more baggage as soon as the next-gen chip hit the market. There's not much point in that.

Now, if I was designing a processor today, I'd probably abstract away even more internals, such as registers (why not just let the processor's cache manager map memory addresses to internal registers, rather than have two namespaces?) since those vary from model to model; but the x86 virtual machine that's a modern processor does a good enough job that it's not worth it to change it.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[DaveGod]

Last I heard Apple was making software, engineering how to combine other people's hardware and designing the aesthetics. And most significantly perhaps, marketing it. I'd go so far as to suggest all those other things are part and parcel of the marketing. I thought pretty much all the hardware components were sourced from and put together into final product by the likes of Foxconn, Asustek, Quanta and I guess many others. Even the OS is based on Unix.

Acquiring a major semiconductor company would be unlike Apple, who use Intel chips in their Macs and in the mobile devices the "Apple Ax" chip, which is really an ARM Cortex design tweaked by "Apple" (more literally, probably by Samsung under Apple's direction) and manufactured by Samsung.

Apple stick to their core business pretty well. This relates to the first parent's comment aswell:

And a damn good one it would be. I can't even begin to imagine the profits Dell could reap through the fruits inherited from an AMD buyout. It's much cheaper to manufacture products when you control every aspect of most of the primary components being used. And then also manufacturing facilities.. well, even more so.. wow.

Apple enter into contracts with suppliers for pretty much any non-core activity. Good "partnership" arrangements give them most of the benefits of controlling the supply chain, while at the same time they retain Foxconn et al's specialist skills and economies of scale. I don't mean to be extolling the virtues of Apple, they're just a widely-known example of the strategy.

Ask what benefit there is to be found from buying a supplier then ask if it's possible to obtain much the same from just partnering with them. Say a chip costs AMD $10 to make plus $15 share of the R&D and they sell for $30. There's a $5 margin there if you buy them right? Well maybe, but if you're Dell or Apple you can partner up and say you'll buy a million chips a year for 5 years if they'll sell at $13.

But wait! It costs $25 per chip so that's an $12 loss? Wrong. The $15/chip R&D cost is fixed and it might average out to $10/chip with the new custom. Still a loss? Yeah but the other customers already covered it through their $30 price so incrementally it's a $3 profit. It's actually probably even better than that since other scale economies come into play, plus there's that guaranteed 5 year contract so you can make better, less risky plans.

Even if you couldn't get the cheaper price and the alternative was to buy at $30, there's a nice margin to take hold of by buying them right? Suuuuure... But you just threw down the money to buy the company. Share capital isn't really that far off being a loan when you're a big company, shareholders want their return just like a lender wants their interest. If you're a $10b company and investors expect 10%pa well you'd better make them $1b each year, either in dividends or capital growth (which is really expectation of future dividends). If you raise $5b to buy another company and (assuming risk etc stays the same) only make $1.5b then the whole thing was pointless because it's still 10%.

If you want to buy a company you need to be better than them at what they do, be able to get rid of a load of duplicated costs (i.e. staff), be preying on an undervalued company or simply not be able to achieve a good partnership with them. Otherwise you should be able to get pretty much all the benefits with significantly less risk by partnering up.

Although... There is one other thing. Dell buying AMD results in Dell's competitors being at the mercy of Intel, which would be even closer to monopoly. The counter point however is Dell is also at the mercy of what they can do with AMD. I don't think Dell wants to compete with Intel. Not in the CPU market and not even indirectly with Intel supporting Dell competitors.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Belial6]

but the support was dropped when it turned out that a software emulator was faster

You say that like it is a bad thing. Other than a performance hit compared to native, what is the down side of emulation? Before you say that the having an abstraction layer between the application and the hardware, please keep in mind that every major OS today is loaded with abstraction layers, so that argument will need something more than 'it's faster to not have the abstraction.'

If Arm could produce a processor that could run x86 code through emulation at even the speeds of an Atom processor, it would be a reasonable solution to running x86 software.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[VolciMaster]

Looking at probably independent sites (the tech report, tom's...), you have to get fairly high in the end for Intel platforms (ie, CPU+Chipset+motherboard) to be cost-competitive at a given level of performance, at that's for PCs heavily skewed towards the Gamer and Enthusiast market.

Most of the money made in the CPU world is not in the "Gamer and Enthusiast market" - it's in the server market.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you dumb? You happen to be quite wrong about better power efficiency and AMD comes out at much better value for performance per watt and performance per dollar. Get your facts straight before commenting.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[c0lo]

Is Dell considering making a more integrated kind of product line? Talk about a change in strategy.

It's much cheaper to manufacture products IF you can control every aspect of most of the primary components being used. And then also manufacturing facilities.. well, even more so.. wow.

FTFY... I don't know how long Dell would be able to keep the AMD-brand CPU-es relevant.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[bathyscaaf]

I thought AMD split off their chip foundry as a new company -- that would mean no manufacturing facilities unless they bought that new company as well.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Zerimar]

A huge portion (if not most) of the profits come from the enterprise space, where often you buy the biggest, best servers. Sure, for an average desktop a cheap AMD chip might be a better choice, but for an enterprise server (or a high end VM server), performance is king and AMD isn't even competitive.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh, times are changing, some of the hottest ultra-portables are AMD based right now and AMD's newest lineup will be quite different than before. AMD's mainstream, workstation and server cpus are getting major overhaul this year and will be much more competitive, and a much better value as always. Margins will be up and AMD will be growing in market share throughout 2010.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[hedwards]

Right now, yes, but had it not been for Intel bribing companies to refuse to use AMD's chips, I'm not really sure that would be the case. R&D is expensive, and while historically AMD has been quite far ahead of Intel at points, it's never really gotten the advantage of being able to sell it's products on merit.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[recharged95]

Ditto, a great move for Dell if so.

They have always competed more against Apple than HP/Lenovo/Acer.

With AMD, they are on a level playing field (well a much higher level in the end) with Apple as they can now build tablet form factors using their own CPUs/Graphics.

Mobile phones are becoming generic--they have too since you either call, IM, or sms. Tablets are where the real customization comes to play and Dell needs to go there since PCs are getting phased out for the masses.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Rockoon]

Well that is sort of misleading.

First of all..

ARM is also fabless, but the difference is that AMD contracts out for the production of chips whereas ARM simply sells chip designs.

This is a significant distinction, as AMD still has contractual control over the baking, whereas ARM couldnt give a shit about anything other than selling their IP.

Secondly..

AMD owns the ATI fabs and continues to produce GPU's from them.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[shutdown -p now]

My guess is they're both moving towards Apple's model. Could a real Dell-customized Linux desktop be far off?

If they truly are moving towards Apple's model, then it won't really matter if it's Linux or not - since you won't get root and shell anyway.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[bwcbwc]

At least until the Sandy Bridge chipset gets sorted out...Unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat with Llano, Sandy Bridge is going to take the power efficiency crown, and the price range for those chips puts a lot more pressure on AMD's price/performance leadership.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[__aasehi2499]

I would trade a little less profitability in the short term for something like that.

But the shareholders of Dell wont, and that is how AMD becomes the bastard child of a company that is more focused on bloatware than hardware.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[djdanlib]

Actually, Apple just switched vendors. IBM manufactured and sold the G5 CPUs and chipsets to Apple.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[blair1q]

You do realize that most of Dell's revenue stream is propped up by money given to them from Intel?

No it isn't. Hasn't been for years. And Intel settled with the FTC, saying it would never be.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[blair1q]

benchmark ego masturbation

Always go with that. The $1k Intel CPU I bought 3 years ago to build my home desktop system is only now becoming "average" on the benchmarks.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[crafty.munchkin]

Everyone's reality is slightly different. In mine, your view is delusional - I've had a much higher failure rate with HP laptops, desktops and servers in production than Dell or IBM/Lenovo. In the last 5 years, I've made 6 calls to Dell and 4 of them were for DOA equipment, versus 17 calls to HP - one critical fault with a production server (covered by a 24x7x4 support contract) took them 4 days to fix, meaning that an entire office had no systems access whatsoever for 4 days...

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[chowdahhead]

I think the performance gap closes even more when the ICC isn't used, which is relevant for desktop/server Linux customers.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you dumb? You happen to be quite wrong about better power efficiency and Intel comes out at much better value for performance per watt and performance per dollar. Get your facts straight before commenting.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. With the purchase of Intrinsity here in Austin, Apple is back in the business of creating their own goo (ie, hardened ARM cores).

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[toddestan]

I take it your organization doesn't have any Dell GX260's.

Still, their P3-era workstations are solid. Even now when the machines are 10+ years old.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Debro]

Can this be likened to the:
AMD CPU's are useless for "Audio Recording & Audio Processing" balderdash that was going around 10 years ago?
Linky ->http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Installation_Guides

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[toddestan]

Maybe he's referring to the Atom?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[drsmithy]

u can get mid range AM3 boards for $80, The cheapest 1366 board is twice that.

There are few products that personify "you get what you pay for" more than motherboards.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[dave87656]

It's much cheaper to manufacture products when you control every aspect of most of the primary components being used.

That would give Dell the ability to compete with Apple at least in the sense that they would control all the critcal hardware. I haven't been overly impressed with Dell, though I'll admit, our last server with them was up for 4 years straight, 24x365, and we only shut it down when we bought a more powerful server (all using Linux).

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[beelsebob]

The i7 940 not only being previous generation, but previous generation that's so old that it was ages ago discontinued in favour of the 950.

Try comparing to current generation chips – the i3 2100, the i5 2{3,4,5}00 or the i7 2600.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[wintersdark]

Really?
I have been trying to compare this recently. I own a Q8300 based machine for my living room, so no anti-intel bigot here, and am looking to replace an aging desktop but can't find any intel stuff that seems to compete at my price point. For comparison I am looking at a phenom 965 black, ~$160. I am planning on spending about $100 on the mobo. So for ~$250 I want the best quad core setup I can get, no matter who makes it. Before you ask, having 4 cores is more important in what I will use them for than having the best single core performance.

* Warning, this post is entirely subjective and anecdotal.

I picked up a BE 965 and have been running it for a while on an ASUS m4a89gtd(USB3). It's overclocked through BIOS on air(though with an inexpensive aftermarket cooler), to 3.8ghz purely by modifying the multiplier, no voltage changes etc; and has remained rock solid there for ~6 months 24/7. It doesn't compete with the high end I7's, but it easily holds it's own against the rest, and does it at a ridiculously low price. If you look into people's results online, 3.8-4ghz is pretty common for these chips, with 4ghz being readily attainable on air with some effort but I'm too lazy for that, the 3.8's good enough for my purposes.

At that price point, it's an incredible value for the performance you get.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[hitmark]

Servers can be many things.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[sglewis100]

Servers can be many things.

Yes, they can. But the margins are in the server market, and by that, the poster was referring to enterprise sales, not a home built frankenpc that has tons of hard drive space to hold all of your downloaded movies.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Phoghat]

I've always been a proponent of AMD because I always look for bang/buck performance. Intel has the reputation for exploring the bleeding edge and AMD is trailing, but not by much. In years past Dell was a leader in PDAs with various iterations of its Axim, now with Android tablets such as the Streak and a link with AMD, perhaps the Android tablet would come down to a price point agreeable to normal people.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[hesaigo999ca]

Dell is also about the bottom line, and in the end, it will make it cheaper to buy their products if they cut out the middle man and have no worries about paying points on cost to make a profit, if they are already making profit on the overall sale. good for everyone this merger, dell will no doubt flourish with this deal, stocks will go up, until the next lack of support fiasco shows up

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[jarlsberg71]

I run 2 Atoms at home (win7 32bit) I'll never render video on them in realtime, but I don't care. my 330 hooked to my UPS with 19" monitor, 2 HDD, printer, router, phone (vonage) speakers and desktop calculator all going full speed hits me at 58watts.
My D525? 66watts. (again, this is system, not chip/mobo)

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[MonsterTrimble]

If I played the stockmarket, I would purchase Dell because of this - I think it would work, and work well. We'll agree to disagree?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[rrhal]

My GX 260 never went down. They replaced the motherboard proactively - a tech came to my office and the whole process took ~ 15 minutes. It's still working today.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[hardwarefreak]

Maybe yes, maybe no. The big loser in this would be Intel. I'm not sure of the % of Dell computers that ship with AMD CPU's but it's certainly less than 25%. Dell is big enough to hurt Intel if they switch to AMD.

Which is why this "story" is purely rumor. This is simply a move by Dell to get _much_ better pricing out of Intel. Dell has no intention of actually buying AMD. They wouldn't know how to run the combined company if they did. Look at Dell's roots. Dell is a build-to-order firm, not a bottom-to-top manufacturing company.

bleh

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on how this goes I may have to make the switch to nvidia >_>

Please, god, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to have to switch to Intel and nVidia for everything. I love the price:performance ratio that AMD and ATI give me too much.

Some relief at last?

[Drakkenmensch]

Maybe now Dell will be done and get some distance from those unstable, overheating Nvidia cards.

Re:Some relief at last?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe now Dell will be done and get some distance from those unstable, overheating Nvidia cards.

If they can make the Catalyst drivers semi-decent, I'm all for it.

Re:Some relief at last?

[Tr3vin]

We would then have GPUs and CPUs with that world renowned Dell quality.

Re:Some relief at last?

[dieth]

Quality such as faulty mobos that flat line your CPU for minutes while the instruction buffer is unusable (google Dell Optiplex GX270 recall) - They also refused to acknowledge this was a problem for the first 2 years, always telling the customer to re-install their OS.

Quality such as Indian Tech support reps that can't speak a single coherent word of English, (Unless you bend over and pay for gold level [cashrape] support)

Need I go on?

Re:Some relief at last?

[Tr3vin]

Woosh?

Re:Some relief at last?

[dieth]

Nah I'd just say I was venting. Pretty sure I'm familiar with Dell's great standards already.

Re:Some relief at last?

[Tr3vin]

Just making sure. The last thing I want is for people to think that I like Dell.

Re:Some relief at last?

[MagusSlurpy]

And motherboards that stop reading 4 out of 6 SATA drives? Or have floating-point arithmetic bugs?

Dear god no.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind if AMD could buy out Dell, then maybe their quality would go up or their price would come down on the decent systems but not the other way around.
I am a big AMD fanboy when it comes to their processors, if they were bought out by Dell, I could see them turning into the Cyrix processors of the coming years or some situation where the good AMD chips are only sold in Dell PCs or some other crap.

I love AMD, but I despise Dell when it comes to their products.

Captcha: "Miscarry" how fitting,

Re:Dear god no.

[ElectricTurtle]

You do realize that Cyrix hasn't existed for more than a decade, right? And as much as I respect Via's approach to their products, they just can't produce a processor with performance equivalent to AMD or Intel.

If AMD's quality is reduced to Dell's level generally following a buyout I'll be forced to switch loyalties too.

Cue darth vader:

[Vectormatic]

*raises hands* NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

On a serious note, Intel must be shitting themselves right now, if Dell were to buy AMD, intel just lost their biggest customer

Re:Cue darth vader:

[Narcocide]

...which of course is assuming that Intel isn't paying Dell to buy up AMD then liquidate them to eliminate competition in the CPU market...

Re:Cue darth vader:

[badran]

That would hurt Intel in the long run, as they would not be able to sell to Government agencies.

Re:Cue darth vader:

[geekoid]

Not necessarily. Dell will sell what it can sell. If there are people who will buy Intel, Dell will sell them Intel.

Re:Cue darth vader:

[TheRaven64]

if Dell were to buy AMD, intel just lost their biggest customer

According to Wikipedia, Dell is only third in market share in the PC market, with 11.5%, behind HP (19.8%) and Acer (18.5%). So, they'd lose a big customer, but not their biggest. It's not clear how big a customer Apple is - some of their stuff, like the Apple TV doesn't show up in the PC market. It's also worth noting that Intel makes a lot of things other than CPUs (e.g. SSDs), which Dell may continue to buy even if they're shipping AMD chips.

The real win for Dell would be outside the PC market, in products like the AppleTV and other things that are computers internally, but behave like appliances. With in-house CPU / GPU / chipset design teams, they'd be in a much stronger position to compete in this area, which looks like it will be quite a bit more profitable than the PC market for a while.

Re:Cue darth vader:

[mitgib]

That would be a boon for abacus makers.

Re:Cue darth vader:

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they? I thought HP was their biggest customer followed by Dell, Acer, and then Apple. Hmm I could be wrong though

Re:Cue darth vader:

[jonbryce]

Well Apple TV 2 of course switched to ARM. I guess your emphasis is on "products like".

Re:Cue darth vader:

[blair1q]

And AMD just lost all of Dell's competitors as customers.

Re:Cue darth vader:

[517714]

And AMD loses all of its customers who consider Dell a competitor. Unless Dell can consume all of AMD's production (or at least as much as AMD is currently producing) this kills the chip side of the business within a few years. Dell would have a problem introducing new products as each one will reduce their chip market.

Re:Cue darth vader:

[Dolda2000]

To be fair, the "dual suppliers" thing doesn't seem to deter government agencies from buying Microsoft products. I suspect they'd just ignore it the exact same way if Intel were to become the only x86 CPU supplier (which, of course, they wouldn't even, seeing how companies like Via still exist for that matter).

AMD CPU, ATI graphics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would Dell switch all its products to AMD/ATI only? That would be a big change

Why Would They Do That?

[Greyfox]

So they can both suck in stereo?

Can they actually do this ..?

[Seggybop]

My understanding is that currently there's something of an enforced equilibrium between Intel and AMD, wherein Intel needs AMD to exist in a somewhat healthy state in order to avoid being considered a monopoly. If Dell bought AMD, what would happen to that? Would Dell then sell AMD chips to other (competing) manufacturers?

There might be something similar going on with ATI vs nvidia as well. =/

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[Anon E. Muss]

Would Dell then sell AMD chips to other (competing) manufacturers?

Dell would probably be happy to sell the chips. The real question is, would competing manufacturers want to buy them? For example, I'm quite sure that HP would phase out and eventually stop selling systems with AMD processors. Big companies don't like sending money to their competitors.

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[mozumder]

Intel is competing against ARM manufacturers now.

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[w_dragon]

For embedded devices, sure. But I don't see any desktops or laptops being sold with anything other than x86 at Best Buy. Microsoft competes with Nintendo and Sony in games, doesn't mean they don't have an OS / document suite monopoly.

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[smelch]

I seriously doubt that would happen, as Intel would probably price their chips to manufacturers up to reflect the fact that AMD is owned by a competitor. Businesses constantly give money to competitors anyway because business relationships are very complex. HP wants to outsell Dell in PCs, not processors. Giving money to the Dell processor designing unit does not make the Dell PC business more profitable. If Dell started selling their desktops at very narrow margins or even a loss hoping to drive HP to bankruptcy then you would have a point, but Dell is unlikely to do that since AMD makes considerably less money at current volumes than their desktop lines. Add in the fact that if you don't make AMD profitable for Dell they may stop making quality products and Intel gets to jack up their prices with no alternative. It just wouldn't make sense.

The only thing this deal would affect is fanboy support, which really doesn't have any effect at on AMD's profitability, as much as we would like it to.

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in the consumer market, they aren't. Maybe for mobile or embedded systems.

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[blair1q]

There is no such situation.

AMD can go out of business and the FTC would just let life go on, as long as Intel didn't do anything to drive them out of business other than offer products at a profit that nonetheless were preferred by customers. And since the FTC just made sure that Intel isn't doing anything like that, then that's the case.

Re:Can they actually do this ..?

[jedwidz]

Maybe Dell stops selling AMD components to third parties. This hands Intel a monopoly in the (non-low-power) x86 market, allowing Intel to increase their margins, which Dell's competitors have to pay. That could spell a big competitive advantage for Dell.

Plus there's no lost sales for AMD if Dell can swallow AMD's entire production capacity.

Apple?

[mario_grgic]

Would it not make more sense for Apple to buy AMD? They are already in CPU business and custom hardware, they ship their Macs with AMD video cards, and they are not particularly happy with Intel's video on CPU and controllers or their ultra low voltage offerings for Airs.

Re:Apple?

[yakovlev]

Been there, done that, DON'T want to do it again.

It was called: PowerPC.

Apple has decided (probably correctly for them) that the processor is a commodity, not a product differentiator. Apple has figured out that it's better for them to use the same processor chip everyone else does, and differentiate their products with software and industrial design.

The problem with using your own unique high-performance processors is that if you're ahead you might see a small benefit, but if you ever get behind, you lose big. This is almost exactly what happened with PowerPC and the move to Intel. Apple learned that since people don't buy Macs for the processors, it would be silly to invest in building something at best marginally faster/cheaper than the "industry standard" Intel processors.

Mobile phone processors are a little different, because there you're not really building the processor, you're using an ARM design and tacking on a few custom circuits. The costs of doing this are much lower, and you do it for peripheral cost/features, not to be better than your competitors.

Re:Apple?

[Junta]

I agree that purchasing AMD would be odd, PowerPC pretty much left Apple at the mercy of Motorola and IBM in the same way they are at the mercy of AMD and Intel today. I think the straw that broke the camel's back was that Apple could not get IBM to compete with Intel in the low-power arena and Apple was pretty much powerless to get what they wanted because it was all IBM at that point. History is kind of repeating with x86 v. ARM for them currently in the space that really matters to them (i.e. Mac desktops/laptops are barely a blip against the larger iPhone/iTunes market) making an x86 investment on the scale of purchasing AMD a bad idea. The long shot would be purchasing for GPUs, but so far no one has proven they can do awesome stuff in the power envelope given on that front and the current 'good enough' GPU capability may limit the usefulness of ATI.

Re:Apple?

[iperkins]

Dang, I was just going to suggest this. They purchased a chip outfit for their iOS needs, why not one for their Mac line? They could even keep the AMD name: Apple Mints Dough

Re:Apple?

[TheRaven64]

The problem with PowerPC was that no one except Apple was shipping PowerPC desktops. The idea, originally, was that IBM would sell PowerPC PCs running Windows at the low end, PowerPC workstations running AIX at the high end. Apple would sell PowerPC computers running MacOS. Other PC makers would sell PowerPC computers running Windows. They'd use a common hardware reference platform so that you could run any PowerPC OS on any vendor's hardware, and they could keep costs low by sharing chipset and CPU development costs among all of the manufacturers.

Unfortunately, by the end, no one except IBM and Apple was selling PowerPC computers, and they were selling them in very different markets. Motorola / Freescale concentrated entirely on the embedded side and IBM on the console and HPC markets. If Apple wanted a desktop or laptop processor, they had to be willing to fund all of the development costs, which they weren't. IBM would have been quite happy to produce a low-power 64-bit PowerPC, but they'd have charged so much for it that Apple would not have been able to sell computers using it.

The main benefit of the Intel switch was that Apple accounts for something on the order of 10% of Intel's sales. They're a big enough customer to get preferential treatment, but not a big enough customer that they have to shoulder most of the development costs. They only have to finance 10% of the R&D, not 90%.

This is also the reason why they didn't got to AMD. Apple would have been buying something like 60% of AMD's output, which would have put them in the same position, just with a different company and a different architecture.

Re:Apple?

[Belial6]

Of course, that would require them to be sure that ARM isn't going to end up fast enough to run in their desktop computers. As much as I am not a huge fan of Apple's products, one thing Apple has successfully pulled off, not once, but TWICE, is a migration to a new processor architecture.

what would happen to AMD's chip sales

[Anonymous Coward]

to HP, Lenovo, Asus, Sony, and Toshiba, when the latter realize that they're enriching their competitor?

Hint: turn your eyes lower.

Re:what would happen to AMD's chip sales

[RoccamOccam]

I'm wondering the same thing. If I recall correctly, Wendy's dropped Pepsi products in favor of Coke products for exactly this reason - Pepsi, KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell were (are?) owned by the same company and Wendy's thought it was bad business to purchase from a major competitor.

Re:what would happen to AMD's chip sales

[vlm]

Pepsi, KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell were (are?) owned by the same company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum!_Brands

pepsi owned them and spun them out as "yum brands Inc" in 1997.

Pepsico, aside from innumerable soft drink brands, mostly sells stuff best described as "junk food you would buy at a convenience store, and, weirdly enough, quaker oats"

Re:what would happen to AMD's chip sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Good catch.

Another example is the problems IBM had defining standards in the PC world once Compaq and dozens of others had established a successful cloning business. The clones didn't want to hear about MicroChannel because they figured the evolution of the standard was controlled by their biggest competitor. OS/2 initially got industry support (especially from Compaq) early on, when it was jointly sponsored by IBM and Microsoft. But once Microsoft abandoned it in favor of Windows 3.0, IBM had a hard time getting its competitors on board with OS/2 Warp.

Re:what would happen to AMD's chip sales

[Tacvek]

Buying Quaker Oats may have been for the purpose of acquiring the Gatorade brand, rather than most of the other assets of Quaker Oats, although I'm sure they still make profit on that too.

Bad idea...

[Junta]

For Dell.

We are talking about a chip design company that is at best second-place in most business concerns (GPU sometimes in an exception).

In the CPU industry, you are talking about a move that would severely alienate Intel, a valuable partner in the server arena at the moment. Further complicating things is that a lot of consumer electronics are on the ARM platform, with an ever-increasing chunk, and I don't think AMD has licensed that platform.

On the GPU front, they would be alienating nVidia.

Either by choice or force, you'd see Dell's competitors stop selling AMD products, and maybe medium-term some AMD loyalists will follow Dell, but overall you'd see people giving up on AMD as an invitation for total platform lock-in.

Re:Bad idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why an Apple acquisition would make much more sense

Re:Bad idea...

[specialguy92]

They would alienate both Intel and nVidia? Dell should start a company with those products... they could call it Alienware!

Re:Bad idea...

[gstrickler]

We are talking about a chip design company that is at best second-place in most business concerns (GPU sometimes in an exception).

Most business applications aren't CPU bound. The difference between a current AMD or Intel CPU is irrelevant for 90% of business users, and 70+% of consumers. If you're into HPC, scientific work, simulations (including intense gaming), video encoding/transcoding, or a few other specialized areas Intel may have the advantage, but even in those areas, a GPU may be more important than the CPU.

Servers are different, but AMD is pretty competitive with Intel on server CPUs

I'm not saying the Dell buying AMD would be good for Dell, AMD, or the overall market, but your assertion that AMD "is at best second-place in most business concerns" is simply not accurate.

What would be far more interesting is if Intel bought Nvidia. Bring Nvidia's GPU performance and driver compatibility to IGP, and Intel's power management and process technology to Nvidia's GPUs. That would really put the squeeze on AMD.

Re:Bad idea...

[gstrickler]

That's a terrible idea. If AMD were still delivering performance and power usage comparable to Intel, maybe. But Apple buying AMD, or even using AMD's slower & less power efficient CPUs than the majority of the industry, would be one more thing Apple would have to battle to gain marketshare. Apple making a strategic investment in AMD to help put pressure on Intel might not be a bad idea, but Dell, HP, and/or MS could do the same.

Re:Bad idea...

[DarthVain]

"at best 2nd place"? Seriously? Who is even close to AMD in the CPU market? VIA? Motorola? ARM? Give me a break. They are firmly in 2nd to Intel, and always have been.

So? Intel doesn't own ARM. Licence ARM all you want. Whats the problem? Also AMD is big in the server market, I would say their servers are doing better than their consumer goods.

nVidia? Who cares. Your would OWN ATI. If you think Intel is not happy with this rumor, well nVidia has more to lose. Video cards are for the most part a "consumer" market, of which Dell is the biggest player.

As for Dell not sharing AMD products don't be silly. AMD would sell to as many companies as it can. Dell is not about to limit that it would be foolish.

On the plus side, you would see AMD get even bigger, and perhaps be able to compete with Intel on a level playing field.

Dell is firmly in bed with Microsoft, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Re:Bad idea...

[AmberBlackCat]

But businesses like Dell. Would they care what's inside the box?

Speculation

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I would say the recent departures of senior executives — COO Robert Rivet last week, CEO Dirk Meyer back in January — is still unexplained and can lead to all kinds of speculation. There's not a lot of color on the rumor at this point. Is Dell considering making a more integrated kind of product line? Talk about a change in strategy.

Re:Speculation

[ISoldat53]

Dell could use a few senior execs to resign also. Hope springs eternal.

Re:Speculation

[blair1q]

Neither of these companies needs the clowns at the top of the other company to be the head of a merged company.

If they buy each other, it would be like a Mini buying a Fit, head-on, on a bridge.

The problem...

[Junta]

Is that *no* x86 processor is going to appeal relative to their ARM for low-power applications. AMD has an edge for capable integrated graphics, but all in all the x86 offerings are not going to improve by going to AMD with respect to heat/battery concerns.

I hope not.

[ganktor]

I really hope this is just a rumor. I have been die hard AMD since the K6-2. I don't think that this would ruin AMD, but I can't believe that it would benefit it. Besides that, I really, really despise Dell. I was sad when AMD ditched the ATI name. Probably just nostalgia because the first rig I built was a K6-2 with an ATI video card and I've been AMD/ATI ever since. I can just see the AMD name going away. I would have to switch to Intel just to not have a stupid Dell part in my computer. I know this is a lame whining rant, but I really hope the sale is just a rumor.

Re:I hope not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same feelings.
The few times I had to deal with Dell the level of incompetence was simply beyond me and despite disliking Intel and nvidia I too would be forced to switch.

Poor ATI

[SilverJets]

Bad enough it was bought by AMD but to wind up being owned by Dell? Blech.

Re:Poor ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad enough it was bought by AMD but to wind up being owned by Dell? Blech.

Really?

I found ATi cards were only worth buying after the merger. The hardware was lame and the drivers were awful; now the hardware is great and the drivers merely suck (10.12 is a vast improvement to Catalyst at least so I have some hope).*

* (The system I'm using has a Radeon HD 5850 in it)

Re:Poor ATI

[gstrickler]

ATIs GPU performance and drivers have both improved significantly since AMD purchased them. Like it or not, AMD and ATI has been a good combination for both companies.

Re:Poor ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so great for the engineers... I remembered this comment from a few weeks ago, and had to go dig it up, as it's spot on:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1944970&cid=34835060

The politics is truly awful on the ex-ATI side (I'm ignoring the AMD-vs-ATI politics, which is also frustrating). Good people are leaving, not-so-good people (or rather, people good at covering themselves with teflon and playing politics) are being promoted as a retention effort. Promotions are creating power vacuums, which *obviously* require promoting more people to fill the voids. Director (management track) positions are fabricated to promote people who couldn't get promoted on the technical track. It's unbelievable how many directors and senior managers we have now, and I'm certain we'll have a dozen more within a year. It's nuts, and really is worse than anywhere else I've ever worked, or even heard of.

I think it's not just Silicon Valley though, it's now East vs West vs "everyone else", and the empire building (and sabotage thereof) is just horrible. For me, AMD is not recommended as a place to work for anyone that wants to just do solid engineering. Not to say there isn't some top-notch design going on, there absolutely is. But the games played by senior management (the good management has either left or moved up high enough to have lost real visibility) really make the overall experience for most engineers a rather frustrating one. Everyone one I know is quietly (or not so quietly) looking for opportunities elsewhere...

Getting bought by Dell would just mean a whole new round of disgusting sycophancy... Hard to imagine it being worse, but I think a Dell buyout would probably manage.

Re:Poor ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

There's BS everywhere, but if this is even half true, it's sad to hear. ATI used to be a great place to work, hate to think it's devolved to this. :(

How about Linux support ?

[BESTouff]

The only thing I'm interested in, is how about the linux support ? AMD has been quite good lately, Dell has been so-so. With Dell buying AMD, I'm fearing linux support will go down.

Re:How about Linux support ?

[arkane1234]

Dell == computer manufacturing company
AMD == Chip (Microprocessor + GPU) processing company

Comparing the two in the aspect of Linux support is comparing apples to oranges. It's a whole completely new arena.

Any issues between Dell and Linux is anything else but the CPU.

Re:How about Linux support ?

[MidoriKid]

No kidding! I was seeing a performant, open-source ATI driver on the horizon. If this deal goes through, I doubt my dreams will materialize.

After they funded Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all that illegal under-the-table dealings with Intel over the years?
Seems like they should have done this years ago, or not at all.

Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[guidryp]

If Dell buys AMD, goes AMD exclusive, and AMD can't match Intel, Dell will lose out to all it's Intel using competitors.

This is much too big a risk to take, given that odds are in favor of Intel staying ahead.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[MachineShedFred]

Not necessarily - average PC buyers do not buy on actual performance, and haven't for years. See: Pentium 4 sales - the NetBurst architecture that didn't perform anywhere close to as good as what AMD was offering at the time, yet everyone bought them because of the Intel brand at a higher price.

Intel's been building a massive brand recognition since the 486, even though the vast majority of PC buyers couldn't even tell you what Intel makes other than "chips".

It wouldn't be that hard for Dell to just sell the Dell brand, regardless of what's inside the box. They've already been doing that with their shoddy dielectric-bursting capacitors as it is.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ElectricTurtle]

You do realize that Dell doesn't sell performance, they sell service and support, right? The whole reason most enterprises choose Dell is not because of the best hardware (it almost never is), but because Dell offers (generally) very efficient replacement of defective parts including but not limited to "free" (the cost is rolled into the retail and/or separate extended warranty) on-site service. It minimizes the enterprise's downtime and costs for internal IT support overhead. Corporate IT doesn't care that Intel offers 10% better performance than AMD at double the cost, they care whether they can keep all their systems up with minimal support overhead and downtime.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[guidryp]

There is Inertia in the industry, but AMD gained a lot of market share when they had better processors and they lost it again when behind.

It would be a mistake to risk you PC business going exclusive. There is a definite Halo effect that sells processors.

Dell doesn't only sell Consumer machines. What about workstation class machines:

http://www.dvhardware.net/article46769.html
[i]Jon Peddie Research reports Intel owned 99.9 percent of the processor market for workstations in Q3 2010. [/i]
 

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Omega Hacker]

Dell sells support? Really? Have you ever actually dealt with Dell support at anything other than the corporate level?

"Support": I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ColdWetDog]

You do realize that Dell doesn't sell performance, they sell service and support, right?

"You need to reboot your PC."

The whole reason most enterprises choose Dell is not because of the best hardware (it almost never is), but because Dell offers (generally) very efficient replacement of defective parts including but not limited to "free" (the cost is rolled into the retail and/or separate extended warranty) on-site service.

"If that doesn't work, reinstall the operating system."

It minimizes the enterprise's downtime and costs for internal IT support overhead. Corporate IT doesn't care that Intel offers 10% better performance than AMD at double the cost, they care whether they can keep all their systems up with minimal support overhead and downtime.

"Thanks for calling Dell support - have a nice day."

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Brewmeister_Z]

Dell might do better with corporate clients when it comes to service and support but for the average consumer client, it is pitiful at best. I did some Dell hardware warranty work a couple years back and heard the horror stories the customers had to go through to get parts sent out. There were/are way too many middle men in their support model. If you have to spend 5 or 6 hours on the phone with someone who does not speak English in the way the you do while trying to follow directions with technical terms you don't understand, that is not good support. Good support is having local presence that can diagnose and request the parts then follow up to install. The service calls I had were a joke since I had to diagnose the problem to see if the parts delivered were appropriate to solve the problem (the details given to me were usually just the parts sent and few words like WILL NOT TURN ON). This is a case where I see overseas outsourcing as a major failure since it tries to do too much to save money and the customer experience turns off the customer from buying from that vendor again. However, the industry gets away with it since they all typically follow this model.

Alternatively, always use the chat support for Dell or HP if possible. It is much more efficient since written communication versus spoken can help avoid confusion and no sitting on hold for forever.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ElectricTurtle]

I have worked support at many "Dell only" enterprises. I don't agree what they provide is valuable, but that's not as important as whether IT directors, CTOs, VPs etc. believe that Dell's offers are valuable in that dimension. Their marketshare argues that those people making the decisions do perceive Dell as the best choice for these things.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ElectricTurtle]

Honestly I think the only people who buy Dell for their personal use are idiots. Dell practically irrumates their corporate customers who are mid-size or better, not just because of the volume of systems, nor extended support packages, but because it's the corporate customers who buy the really big ticket items, the huge multicore servers with a dozen RAID SAS drives. They don't care about Joe Dipshit's $xxx budget desktop that has almost no margin, especially if he doesn't spring for some consumer-grade extended support package.

Computer consumers engaged the market in a race-to-the-bottom, and they won--a market of cheap crap that will last a year or two. They got what they deserved. They put all the mom and pop's that actually cared about the parts they used out of business. I have no respect for any consumer that buys a major brand COTS. Even with laptops the better stuff is a matter of finding a good whitebox chassis and pairing it with quality drives/memory. But (quality) local computer builders are mostly a memory, the few that are left are usually unscrupulous and compete in the same race-to-the-bottom with the addition of retail space overhead.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind the fact that the capacitor issue was industry wide, but troll away.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[thejynxed]

It's more of a "Cover Your Ass" scenario. It may not be the most high-quality support, but it's support, and they can turn to the Board of Directors and the Shareholders and say, "Hey guys, Dell has got us covered. So we'll keep buying from them." Even though most aren't so dumb as to believe Dell gives much in the way of anything past trained monkey level of support.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[MachineShedFred]

Perhaps it was industry-wide, but no company out there handled it worse than Dell.

See: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/projectfailures/dell-lawsuit-pattern-of-deceit/10165

You might call me a troll, I call you an apologist.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you get if you're a nobody, as your post indicates.
If I'd give them a call, it would be more like

1. Run internal test suite
2. If necessary, swap components, else proceed to 3.
3. "I'll send over guy tomorrow with the needed components, he'll fix it for you."
4. "Thank you for calling, do you have any other problem related to this product?"
Total downtime usually counts in hours, not days.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[hedwards]

Getting an AMD chipset in a computer which is sold by a major retailer has been challenging for some time, due in large part to Intel bribing companies not to offer any. In the last 10 years there's been plenty of times when AMD was wiping the floor with Intel, but it never really got anywhere because most people had issues finding AMD based computers from major integrators.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

only if your a consumer all that you just stated in done in house, it when you need to replace hardware that they count big

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't enterprise. You're a small fry with very little pull; if they lose you, there's a thousand other suckers to take your place.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[RatherBeAnonymous]

How about a small school?

I'm basically a one-man IT shop. Over the years I have purchased a lot of Dells. Mostly they have been Optiplex or Latitudes. And, I always bought the 5 year next-day hardware support. We tend to hold on to desktops around here for 8 to 10 years. No, I'm not kidding. I still have a few PII, Win2k based desktops on the network. While the support contracts are alive I have never had a problem getting Dell to send out a technician with a part the next day. And once the support contracts are up, because Dell sells so many of a model I have no problems finding replacement laptop parts for my aging fleet.

I've never experienced their software support services, and I've heard nothing good about consumer level support. The one time we bought the Dell Dimension desktops was a fiasco. They were only warrantied for 3 years and every one had a hard drive failure before they were 5 years old. Yes I called Dell about it, and no they did not agree to replace the obviously defective hard drives. But, I know I can roll out a fleet of Optiplex desktops or Latitude laptops very quickly with few problems, and I can guarantee they will be running for 5 years, minimum. Sure, some aspects of dealing with Dell can be a pain, but I know exactly what I'm going to get. Every other brand I've dealt with have caused new and unique headaches, and when buying a fleet of machines Dell really knows how to apply discounts, so the prices are good too.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[MagusSlurpy]

Even with laptops the better stuff is a matter of finding a good whitebox chassis and pairing it with quality drives/memory.

Where do you find a whitebox chassis these days? I haven't seen a current-gen one in years.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Compuser]

I have dealt with Dell support twice (bought two systems and had power supplies fail on both - yeah, typical Dell craftsmanship). But both were under warranty. I contacted Dell via their web site, had good exchanges with the rep (yes they ran me through script but they knew to cut through the BS when I told them I knew what I was doing), then within two days (in each case - the failures happened on different dates) a tech drove up to my lab and replaced a power supply. Different tech each time. Same fast, polite and efficient service. So, would I recommend buying a Dell. Hell no. At least if you want to avoid 100% failure rate on your PS. But would I recommend Dell customer service. At least locally, yes I would. Gotta give credit where it is due.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ElectricTurtle]

You have to get to know the notebook ODM products and then search for the model with the features you want, or you can try finding the back channel equivalent of an OEM model depending on which ODM is their supplier. The latter is usually the harder method because the relationships keep changing. Easier to just get to know the ODMs.

Clevo for instance builds a lot of the chassis for Eurocomm, Sager, etc. They used to be involved with Alienware and Voodoo PC, but I think that has changed since those got bought out by Dell and HP. But you can just go to Clevo and browse their products for features. Of course all ODMs don't make it that easy (MSI does as well, and they would be my first choice for a mid-range system, but other big ODMs like Arima, Quanta, etc. don't care about B2C). Then find a good barebones seller like rjtech.com (they're the cheapest I know). The key is to find somebody who will give you the option not to buy all the drop in parts from them. That way you can get the highest quality memory/drives/etc. at the lowest cost somewhere else.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The one time we bought the Dell Dimension desktops was a fiasco. They were only warrantied for 3 years and every one had a hard drive failure before they were 5 years old. Yes I called Dell about it, and no they did not agree to replace the obviously defective hard drives.

Wait... cheaper consumer grade devices are sourced with inferior hard drives then their business line? Next you'll tell me the higher end Fibre Channel drives in SANs have a lower failure rate than the SATA based drives that are creeping into use.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[sglewis100]

I have dealt with Dell support twice (bought two systems and had power supplies fail on both - yeah, typical Dell craftsmanship). But both were under warranty. I contacted Dell via their web site, had good exchanges with the rep (yes they ran me through script but they knew to cut through the BS when I told them I knew what I was doing), then within two days (in each case - the failures happened on different dates) a tech drove up to my lab and replaced a power supply. Different tech each time. Same fast, polite and efficient service. So, would I recommend buying a Dell. Hell no. At least if you want to avoid 100% failure rate on your PS. But would I recommend Dell customer service. At least locally, yes I would. Gotta give credit where it is due.

I'm not sure that your story, and conclusion that there is a 100% failure rate on Dell power supplies within the warranty period is much more than anecdotal. I might even have been in data centers that disagree with that conclusion. I might even be typing on a machine that defies that logic.

Its about Storage

[DarkOx]

This makes total sense, this is about storage. Dell has made some other purchases recently of storage vendors, and has a line of x86 based iscsi mid level SAN products they are seeking to push.

AMD has the right technology for that. You don't need powerful number crunching and the crunching you do need could be optimized easily in the hardware. What AMD offers is good bus and memory architectures that would serve well in those more integrated applications. I suspect this is a way for Dell to continue to leverage their existing technology while giving themselves a say in the development of the features in x86,AMD64 architecture processors and their support chips. They will use that say to get the stuff they want for storage controllers.

Re:Its about Storage

[Junta]

On the flipside, after bringing about that awesome bus/memory architecture, they haven't made any particularly exciting breakthroughs ever since and Intel has caught up on that front.

Sometimes you have the right people and leadership to have an overwhelming improvement like HyperTransport to make you a clear market leader. Often times, that set of people turns out to be a one-trick pony and/or gets sucked out by companies willing to pay them more.

Re:Its about Storage

[0123456]

On the flipside, after bringing about that awesome bus/memory architecture, they haven't made any particularly exciting breakthroughs ever since and Intel has caught up on that front.

More to the point, the 'awesome bus/memory architecture' only really helped them on servers; Intel's FSB was good enough for home users. And from what I've read the weird desire to maintain backwards compatibility with ancient motherboards has harmed their memory performance by forcing them to keep supporting DDR2 as well as DDR3; those kind of compatibility issues are one reason why we switched from integrated memory controllers to independent ones outside the CPU many years ago.

Re:Its about Storage

[h4rr4r]

AM3 does not support DDR2. AM2+ does. AM3 CPUs can be used in AM2+ boards. This means that the on die controller is not used in that instance.

Re:Its about Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes total sense, this is about storage. Dell has made some other purchases recently of storage vendors, and has a line of x86 based iscsi mid level SAN products they are seeking to push.

AMD has the right technology for that. You don't need powerful number crunching and the crunching you do need could be optimized easily in the hardware. What AMD offers is good bus and memory architectures that would serve well in those more integrated applications. I suspect this is a way for Dell to continue to leverage their existing technology while giving themselves a say in the development of the features in x86,AMD64 architecture processors and their support chips. They will use that say to get the stuff they want for storage controllers.

Yup, Dell will spend billions acquiring a x86 chip maker to make better SAN for their 20 business clients worldwide.

Re:Its about Storage

[blair1q]

What AMD offers is good bus and memory architectures

Check more recent benchmarks. Intel's Core-i3/5/7 designs kill.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/5

Re:Its about Storage

[hfranz]

AMD64 was not exciting to you? Sinking the Itanic?

Re:Its about Storage

[Junta]

The memory/bus architecture was concurrent with amd64. In one burst they completely disrupted Intel (Hypertransport, integrated memory controllers, *and* Itanium-killing AMD64), and ever since hasn't brought forth unique, mind-blowingly awesome tech that Intel does not have, though they have continued to be competitive particularly when it comes to pricing.

It took Intel a loooong time to catch up (basically Nehalem, which happened *years* after the first HT, AMD64 processor), but they have and now...

Re:Its about Storage

[Junta]

An AM2+ has no memory controller on the motherboard, just like AM3. The on die memory controller *does* support both DDR2 and DDR3, but not on the same motherboard.

Re:Its about Storage

[hfranz]

You are right, Hypertransport was introduced with the K8 architecture along with the AMD64 ISA.

Since then both Intel and AMD have been playing catch-up with virtualization support, with multicore CPUs, SIMD extensions, etc.

I think the most important asset of a chip manufacturer is their process technology and the ability to shrink the die faster than the competition. Intel has been ahead of AMD all the time. This advantage allowed them to take the detours of Pentium 4 and Itanium without losing too much ground to AMD.

The question is: what would be the mind-blowing awesome tech? My impression is that the innovations take place in the space of low power chips and GPUs. For the CPU the future seems to be even smaller structure sizes, larger caches, more cores and for some markets procesors with CPU and GPU cores on the same die.

This is not going to happen, but if it did...

[tjb]

On the plus side, they could get rid of the overhead from AMD's sales and marketing team because no other system integrator would ever buy an AMD or ATI product again.

This maybe would increase AMD's CPU share - all of Dell plus motherboards for homebrew systems is probably slightly bigger than AMD's current share of the CPU market - but the ATI part of AMD (you know, the profitable part) would lose almost every system design win they have since Apple, Lenovo, HP et. al. wouldn't exactly be keen on putting money directly in a competitor's pocket.

Re:This is not going to happen, but if it did...

[ADRA]

DellAmd keep prices consistent and lets assume that they save 'X' from the cost of producing systems
HP drops AMD CPU's entirely because they "don't like to give money to their competitor"
Intel raises prices by 'Y' for HP because they are the only provider that HP will deal with now

Result:
Dell systems cost X cheaper
HP will be forced to raise systems prices by Y or eat already narrow margins
HP loses

I doubt HP or anyone else for that matter would all but drop AMD chips from their lineups entirely. They may seek a better price point, but I doubt they'd get it.

No more Intel from Dell

[francium goes boom]

I just don't see this happening. While I feel that Dell could handle a 2 tier business and succeed a move like this would more likely hurt their bottom line.

While AMD is currently offered in many of their product lines, they would have to covert their ENTIRE product line over to AMD. Intel would probably pull out and no longer be available through Dell. Why would you continue to support your major competitor?
Because of this Dell risks losing many contracts from businesses that need to keep configurations similar, favor Intel, or a host of other reasons. I don't see the savings of having complete vertical control of the product line overcoming the hit from loss of contracts.

The phone is the future anyways

[DigiShaman]

I wouldn't be too worked up over this. The future has always been in mobile computing, especially the phone market. It wont be long before we dock our cell phones in a station and work via KVM at our office desk. Wireless I'm sure. Aside from full blown out laptops, this has the potential to render the desktop (not high end workstation) obsolete. It will also force admins and managers to consolidate and secure data at the server side. At least more so than now days. That's a very good thing.

No, I think the days of the average desktop PC are numbered. In this fast paced throw-away technological society, the phone is future. Intel would best be suited to focus on this market for mobile CPU and GPUs.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[0123456]

It wont be long before we dock our cell phones in a station and work via KVM at our office desk.

True. Everyone wants a phone with a half-hour battery life, and every company wants employees carrying their work around in their pocket.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sensational futurist nonsense.

There is so many reasons why you are wrong. Desktops are going nowhere in the office environment for one thing. Desktops will always be a cheap readily available method of computing. You obviously live in a bubble and have no knowledge of the rather massive portion of the population who can not afford significant technology. The older people who do not need a lot of mobile computing or just don't care for anything past a simple desktop with a large screen to make it easy on the eyes.

I have 12 desktop computers currently operating in my apartment. A mobile phone plugged into a dock would not be able to satisfy the use of any of them.

They are cheap to build, easy to work on and will always have more powerful options than mobile counterparts. So stationary computers will likely be with us for a long time.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[Joe The Dragon]

and you will big time data fees

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[DigiShaman]

1. People are mobile.
2. Cell phone technology is the fastest growing technology segment around the world.
3. Nations such as Africa, China, and India use their phone more than a PC.
4. The phone allows complete mobility and the ability to back-up local data to the cloud.
5. Technology changes so quickly, spending time and money to upgrade individual components are no longer a cost effective solution for the commodity PC. Want to upgrade, replace the phone. Simple as that.

The days of the desktop PC and the expensive maintenance they require will be on the way out. The desktop will be replaced with cell phones on a docking station. Or at the very least, thin clients.

If you need a stationary computer, it will be classified as a "Workstation". I contend that the days of the cheap/commodity desktop will be replaced by the dock-able mobile phone. Sorry, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[0123456]

The desktop will be replaced with cell phones on a docking station. Or at the very least, thin clients.

There's no benefit to using a cell phone in a docking station rather than a cheap thin client. There are a heck of a lot of disadvantages of using a cell phone in a docking station rather than a cheap thin client.

OK, you could carry all your work around on your phone so you don't need to access it remotely from the thin client, but again, what company in their right mind wants all their employees walking out of the building with their work in an easily lost, easily stolen phone?

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[DigiShaman]

There's no benefit to using a cell phone in a docking station rather than a cheap thin client. There are a heck of a lot of disadvantages of using a cell phone in a docking station rather than a cheap thin client

The newer phones will include multiple cores and be multi-threaded. Even John Carmack is blown away at what the iPhone can do. Rage running at 60fps is nothing to scoff at. That, and newer Droid phones can output HiDef at 720p and soon 1080. So yes, the hardware is definitely there and getting more powerful with each generation.

OK, you could carry all your work around on your phone so you don't need to access it remotely from the thin client, but again, what company in their right mind wants all their employees walking out of the building with their work in an easily lost, easily stolen phone?

Last I checked, corporate owned phones can be wiped remotely. Laptops cannot be that I'm aware of. At least not without an expensive 3rd party solution.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[Belial6]

I think it is a third option. At some point, we will see someone break out with a 'Home Server' VMs have gotten good enough that 99% of home users would be just fine running on a shared home system. There is still some work that needs to be done concerning video, but that could be addressed. If a real usable remote desktop could be standardized (RDP is windows only, and VNC has speed issues as will as missing functionality), we could see thin clients being integrated into monitors and TVs. You might even see the last bits of TV/Monitor convergence from that. The phone would then be just another client on the Home Server. There would be a couple of tasks that you might still want to have running locally on a portable device, like playing music when you don't have cell coverage, but most of the heavy lifting could be done on the server.

This would mean that when you are out and about, and want to use a public, or business KVM, you would plug your phone into the KVM, and would be sitting at your personal desktop.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point of a dock - it charges.
That's the point of KVM - virtualized work environment.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

company wants employees carrying their work around in their pocket.

It's a little too late to stop that trend.

And the page resulting from right-clicking on "reply to this" is broken.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

Your flawed assumptions:

1) the phone runs at full power usage when not plugged into the dock, running mobile apps. Ridiculous.

2) the employee's data isn't all stored on a network volume anyway.

Unsubstantiated rumor

[MyLongNickName]

I seem to be in the minority, but I do not think the merger is viable

1) Antitrust issues: Normally I would scoff at the U.S. gov't stepping in and stopping and anti-competitive merger. This, however, is very high profile and would impace Intel and U.S. business as a whole. I think the private sector would push hard enough that the gov't would have to act.

2) This is antithetical to what has made Dell successful. Dell does not want to be in the business of owning production. They want to be a middle person, putting their brand on items, finding efficiencies in distribution and doing very well at it. Owning production is a different game altogether.

3) Dell would damage their relationship with Intel. As long as Dell is independent they can negotiate hard with Intel and cooperate to ensure that product offerings integrate well with Intel's products. Intel is less likely to want to do business with Dell in a cooperative sense.

Overall, I think this rumor is just a rumor. Course, I've been wrong before, and businesses have done some boneheaded moves.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think that this isn't just a ploy by Dell to get a better deal from Intel?

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[Anonymous Coward]

1) doubtful. apple designs the procs and the hardware and the software on iOS devices, no antitrust issues there 2) what? didn't dell get big by letting people customize their hardware online? that's much closer to production than a lot of other brands. 3) possibly.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[0123456]

What makes you think that this isn't just a ploy by Dell to get a better deal from Intel?

Because Intel would laugh if Dell said they were only going to sell AMD CPUs in future?

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[geekoid]

2) the middle person is loosing money. Owning the line increase profit. This is what Wal-mart, Amazon, and many very successful companies do.

3) If they own AMD, then they won't really need Intel except for in the server space, and that's a different market and Intel would be happy to continue there relationship. That aren't going to loose server sales to 'get' Dell.

I don't know if ti's true or not. Hell, Dell may have started it becasue they are getting ready to enter negotiations with Intel.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[MyLongNickName]

2) the middle person is loosing money. Owning the line increase profit. This is what Wal-mart, Amazon, and many very successful companies do.

The part about losing money is untrue. Dell has done well in this space. Wal-Mart does not try to own production... I don't know where you get this from. Wal-Mart is a master at squeezing the hell out of its suppliers... doing the research on this for a master's level paper. Parts of it make you nauceous(man I miss my Firefox spell checking...). But Wal-mart is not in the game of owning production.

3) Creating enemies out of suppliers is a bad game. And buying AMD does not magically make profits go up. Your costs are the same and you still have to deal with inter-segment pricing. I think managers fall into this trap as well thinking that '1+1' automatically equals 3.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[MyLongNickName]

1) Apple is in a slightly different Market (read 'slightly' as 'hugely'). And Apple does not own the actual production. They outsource a lot so they can be nimble and cut ties with a supplier at their whim. As far as Anti-trust, Dell and HP are the lion's share of the market. Intel and AMD are an even bigger lion's share. Any merger in this area should be scrutinized heavily.

2) Dell still does not own the production. They are a middleperson in the process and that is where they want to be.

3) Glad we are kinda agreed :)

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel and Dell (along with other PC manufacturers like IBM, Lenovo and HP) were fined by the SEC for cash payments to exclude AMD processors. This collusion, alone, should be enough to scare regulators interested in promoting competition.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this is their way of negotiating with Intel. If Intel believes that this is a credible option for Dell then perhaps they will give Dell better pricing.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[jonbryce]

There are no overlaps in the product lines of Dell and AMD, so there are zero anti-trust issues from a legal point of view.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[Device666]

To quote wikipedia on the lemma disintermediation :"A prime example of disintermediation is Dell, Inc., which sells many of its systems direct to the consumer — thus bypassing traditional retail chains. In the non-Internet world, disintermediation has been an important strategy for many big box retailers like Walmart, which attempt to reduce prices by reducing the number of intermediaries between the supplier and the buyer. Disintermediation is also closely associated with the idea of just in time manufacturing, as the removal of the need for inventory removes one function of an intermediary".

Micheal Dells credo was in fact: "cutting out the middleman". This intensively competative low-margin business is a race to the bottom. And on the bottom you will find the only way by becoming the producer, as the only option left to maintain profitable margins. This is a shift from the traditional of Dell's think in one part, but at the same time also cutting your self out as a middleman. There are indeed problems with it, such as keeping inventory turnover low. However I think this is still managable and in some way the direct sell to the customer business model can be maintained, so there is really no middleman left.

But again I disagree that it's Dell who suffers. The suffering will be at the Intel side, because most likely if Dell takes over AMD they will become Intels direct competitor and Intel will lose Dell as a middleman of its products. Intel is dependant of middleman and it does lack the succesful operation of Dell's e-tailing. Dell is not depandent of middleman, they have cut them already out. I expect the same heavy lobbing from both competitor if Dell indeed takes over AMD, so the end result of that will be uncertain for now. But I am already curious what Microsofts position in this lobby would be. Don't be so sure about who wins in the lobbying end, not just yet!

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[MyLongNickName]

While I appreciate the link and the thoughfulness of your reply, I have a couple points.

1) As far as i am aware, Dell does not manufacture anything themselves. If I am incorrect, please show me where I can find this info.

2) Dell is reducing suppliers. That we agree on. However, Dell is still the "middleman" in the sense that they do not produce but act as the distribution system to customers. So Michael's credo aside, they ARE the middleman.

3) I stand behind the fact that Dell is hurt by this merger. They are getting into a production and design phase that they know NOTHING about. They are getting into an area that wold detract from their core strength... driving down costs and seeking to make it up through volume. AMD is not about minimizing costs... they are about huge investments, hoping (forecasting) to recoup investments through entering new markets or taking market away from competitors. These two mindsets are almost diametrically opposed and would lead to huge management problems.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[didroe84]

(1)+(2) I don't think Dell manufactures components but they design their own motherboards, cases, etc and assemble everything. That's a lot different from just reselling stuff. AMD sold the manufacturing part of its business a while ago, they basically just design chips now which is not that dissimilar to Dell's situation.

(3) They could save money by using their own chip designs rather than paying a third party like they do at the moment. I think the biggest gain would be in custom chips for storage/networking kit. I do agree about the investment part though. And selling x86 chips and GPUs isn't their area, especially becuase of the monopoly claims it''s bound to cause.

Overall I think there are some benefits but it's probably not a good idea.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Have you seen the recent split with AMD and Global Foundries? That throws out your number 2 since AMD is getting away from production itself.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[blair1q]

It's a rumor.

Every couple of days another mole pops up saying AMD is being bought by IBM/Apple/HP/Asus/yadda/yadda/yadda and has to be knocked back down by the big mallet for 3 points.

Re:Unsubstantiated rumor

[sznupi]

Well, not only 2) AMD doesn't produce nowadays, too (they do seem to act as distribution / marketing system, apart from R&D); also 3) "driving down costs and seeking to make it up through volume" could conceivably work nicely with, say, minimizing the variety of chips ("configuring" them instead, in a way, near final steps) ... especially in times when we are getting more and more into the area of "good enough" with processing power, when AMD Fusion is very much about minimizing costs.

(but yeah, most likely just a stupid & baseless rumor)

It doesn't make sense for any PC vendor. IBM maybe

[guidryp]

Any PC Vendor would risk putting itself at a performance disadvantage to it's Intel using competition.

Not only that, it would make competing PC vendors leery of using AMD chips.

This would be massive strategic failure for any PC vendor, hastening the slide of both the vendor business and the CPU business.

There are few potential companies that might have a good fit. IBM might be one. IBM might have the silicon expertise, funds and neutrality to keep AMD viable in the CPU industry.

That would be very odd...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unless Dell is considering a fundamental rethink in strategy(as in "trying to turn into IBM" fundamental...), I can't imagine the logic behind buying AMD...

Right now, Dell is more or less Intel's box-assembly bitch; but they are reaping substantial "marketing assistance" funds, and they also seem to be able to buy AMD chips for their cheap seats and/or large-number-of-sockets servers(where hypertransport is still enough of a factor to make up for intel's better cores), since AMD's open-market prices are excellent.

Were they to aquire AMD, they would be spending a great deal of money in order to piss off intel(who would presumably de-friend them to the extent that the feds allow, thus ruining their prices and/or margins on intel-based systems), and obtain super-preferential access to a product that AMD is selling at excellent prices to all comers anyway... Why?

Unless there is some advantage that I'm not thinking of, buying AMD seems like it would essentially amount to conceding the market for things like corporate laptops and small servers to HP et al, and moving to some other strategy(presumably some sort of AMD APU-based light-to-thin desktop strategy(would they be eating Citrix next? between competition from Microsoft and competition from VMware, they might be edible enough), with some combination of leveraging hypertransport's advantages and hoping real hard for Bulldozer on the server/workstation end...)

That would be quite a shake-up. Anybody have an alternate hypothesis that seems less radical?

Re:That would be very odd...

[Junta]

(where hypertransport is still enough of a factor to make up for intel's better cores),

Except Intel does QPI which is pretty well equivalent technically. One could make a competent argument that AMD is more aggressive and pricing parts with enough links for 4/8 socket at the same level Intel is doing parts with only 2 socket capability, but the EX Intel stuff is technically capable of competing with AMD *if* you ignore the pricing structure.

Dude...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude you're getting a dell... and AMD is going to hell

Re:Time to switch to Intel then.

[Anonymous Coward]

VIA!

Rumors

[Iamthecheese]

I wonder how much it costs to start rumors like that whilst selling the stock short from another country.

Re:Rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to buy some DAMD stock.

Re:Rumors

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

It seems like someone always starts these rumors about a buyout, and eventually they do the buyout. It definitely seems deliberate... starting the rumor mill gets the momentum going. See Anheuser Busch - InBev.

excellent

[geekoid]

the three product I will never buy rolled into one easy and convenient company to ignore.

This could be the greatest merger since AOL-Time W

[neo-mkrey]

Oh, wait. . . nevermind.

Not IBM either..

[Junta]

If you want any indication of how important *Intel* x86 is to them, look at their current product line. They used to carry Blade and 2S server models with AMD. Now they just have a 4S box available. One could argue that 2S doesn't make sense with AMD's current architecture to explain away the missing 2S servers, but the Blade omission seems pretty glaring.

IBM is firmly in the Intel camp, and they would do nothing to threaten that in a head-on capacity (doing things with ARM and POWER are a little less direct).

Sounds Kinda Like Dell Wants to finally Grow Up

[The O Rly Factor]

Sounds like Dell wants to finally grow up into a big boy computer company, one that does more than just screw together OEM components for a thin profit margin. Look at Dell's competitors IBM and HP. They do more than just sell cheap computers to people and businesses. They have chipset architectures in their portfolios (POWER, Alpha, Itanium, etc, etc). They have their own Unix flavours (AIX, HP-UX, etc). This allows them to compete on the super large enterprise levels in ways that Dell could never even dream of, since right now they don't have nearly the right IP to compete in this market. They are probably looking to grow up and get into the Mainframe and high performance computer business that their rivals already posses the technology to compete in.

Most likely just a rumor

[Dega704]

If this turns out to be true I will be absolutely baffled, considering how timid Dell has always been about using AMD chips in their machines in the first place. Overall I don't think it would be good for the second largest x86 chip manufacturer to be owned and controlled by a PC maker; especially one that tends to cut corners in my opinion (*cough* capacitors *cough*). Ditching Intel altogether would be a horrible strategy also. Even with the days of the wintel alliance over, they still have a presence and brand recognition in the PC and server markets that is completely unmatched by anyone.

Does anyone remember DEC | Compaq | HP?

[Kernel Corndog]

DEC Alpha just died ... Compaq couldn't execute with it and HP probably didn't care to. Furthermore, I would bet the patent portfolio sharing contracts between AMD and Intel have so many conditional clauses that should AMD get bought out, their access might dry up. As ARM emerges as a direct competitor to Intel and challenge their monopoly, Intel probably would welcome finally getting rid of the competition who's existence has been beneficial to only for regulatory purposes...

Personally, I'd hate to see ATI's tech be gobbled up and made to wither more than anything else. So far they are the only one's who are publishing their specs for open source developers.

OMG! OMG! OMG!

[Gary W. Longsine]

If Dell bought a gun, they would have to point it at their head and pull the trigger!

Uhm, no. There are lots of other things that Dell could do with AMD, aside from commit suicide.

Samsung

[Gary W. Longsine]

More like the equivalent of Samsung, only without the fabs. So they would be more like Dell, than anything, really.

crossing Dell and AMD (hybrids meme)

[Gary W. Longsine]

Or, in Slashdot memespeak: "What do you get when you cross Dell and AMD? Dell."

The sky is falling

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, /. never fails to be awash with Chicken Littles and hyperbole.

"DELL MUST STOP BUYING INTEL". Emphasis most assuredly not mine.

No. They wouldn't. They could continue 100% is the fashion that they already do. In fact, you can already by AMD chips through Dell distribution, and I don't mean in systems. Nothing would change there. Nor would Intel start refusing to sell to Dell. That would be stupid and against all business sense to deny a customer willing to buy your product. Additionally, Dell would then own the rights to a major component of Intels ability to produce chips, AMD64 extensions. Intel licenses from AMD so why would that change?

I also doubt Dell would stop selling Intel, because they would get a % from the licensing, as well as sell a product that many people want. Again, business sense dictates that you sell what your customer wants to buy. They may completely change over their low end systems, but their high end and Optiplex lines would certainly continue to run Intel because that's what their customer base wants.

Lets also not forget that Dell could buy them, then just choose to leave them alone and never touch them, other than to get access to some of their technology patents. This is not likely, but I would be the closest to what would actually happen. Dell is very likely not interested in running AMD, and probably just wants their IP and is willing to put up the cash to get it.

Wow, that would be redonkulously analytical.

[Gary W. Longsine]

So, let me see if I grok you here... if you ignore the computers that generate the most revenue for Apple, then Apple looks like it did five years ago, and that's the opposite of Dell buying AMD?

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously analytical.

[jo_ham]

No, what he's saying is that the comparison that the original thread starter made is that Dell would become like Apple's PC making division - ie, the part of it that designs the laptops, desktops and tower systems.

The part of Apple that designs the phone and iOS product line is irrelevant here, even if it does make more money. It doesn't matter what iOS is doing, Apple's original business is continuing much as it did 5 years ago, even with the switch to Intel.

Not that I necessarily agree that Dell buying AMD makes them like Apple's non-iOS hardware division, but that was the point he was making.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously analytical.

[MachineShedFred]

If by "generate the most revenue for Apple" you actually mean "generate ~30% of Apple's revenue" then you would be closer to correct.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously analytical.

[Marcika]

If by "generate the most revenue for Apple" you actually mean "generate ~30% of Apple's revenue" then you would be closer to correct.

He quite obviously meant generated profits rather than top-line revenue, and therefore he's a lot more right than you...

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously Linux-like.

[Gary W. Longsine]

Dell wouldn't need to buy AMD to do bring a Linux desktop/laptop platform to market. What they would need to do is invest deeply in Linux, in an effort to build up a viable Windows competitor, and somehow do that without coaxing retribution from Microsoft. They might start buy acquiring a Linux vendor, say RedHat or somebody like that. Then, they would notice their calls not getting returned as quickly by Steve Ballmer.

Re:It doesn't make sense for any PC vendor. IBM ma

[LWATCDR]

Or Apple. Not very likely since Apple has such a close relationship with Intel but it would allow Apple to have complete control of their stack. The new CPUs from AMD do seem to be very competitive with Intel right now.
Of course Apple could also decide to go after Microsoft full force. Now that they have the app store on the mac I could see them deciding to create a mac mini plus with a slot for a video card and a desktop speed HD. Price it at $399 or $499 and start really building market share not to mention increase the number of developers.

AMD wants me to go to Intel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.... if AMD truely wants me and many others I know to move to Intel's CPUs, yeah... go ahead and get bought by Dell. Personally will NEVER use a Dell computer EVER again.

..but, doesn't Dell make shitty computers?

[kheldan]

I don't know about anybody else but I don't associate Dell with quality. I can't see them buying out AMD as being good for AMD, I see it as the nail in the coffin of the processor wars with Intel finally having a permanent corner on the processor market, and I don't think that would be good for anyone.

Re:..but, doesn't Dell make shitty computers?

[luther349]

you got that right. dell when it was a young company did make epic pcs, i still got my c610 its old and beatup but still working and for its day it was powerful as hell and still useful today. dell today makes underpowered cheaply built pc. i saw a newer dell a few weeks ago and my year old tosibia out preformed it and he payed more then i did for my pc. the issue dell got to big and are trying to tailer for everyone unlike when they where a younger company with the we build nice pcs.

Re:..but, doesn't Dell make shitty computers?

[Renraku]

Dell buys bargain bin products and slaps the Dell name on them, so you know who to avoid. Things like monitors and mice and keyboards aren't too bad since most of them are already made as cheaply as possible and it turns out they can last a while, but things like PCs with 'all in one' sound/video/lan/etc chipsets being sold in Dell machines as performance machines is what I'm talking about. They'll look you in the eye and tell you that Intel onboard graphics is what today's gamers use.

I wont buy AMD if it is sold to anyone.

[unity100]

with few exceptions, mergers/acquisitions, this kind of financier shit, has always ruined whatever i held dear as products/services. this was also so in the field of i.t..

if amd gets sold to anyone, i will start looking for an alternative that did not whore itself out to rabid bloodsuckers, but still run by their initial founders and vision holders.

no way

[luther349]

dell buying amd would suck. amd would stop being the cheaper and sometimes better chipset for pcs. dell would infalte the prices to intel pricing and nobody will care abought amd anymore. it would be bad for the market intel and nivida would lose there competing brands and pricing will suffer because of it.

Checkmate: Intel

[mauriceh]

Well, this is obvious:
As Dell is already to be known as being in Intels pocket,see teh voluntary payment of over $100 Million regarding the lies about disclosing the payment of rebates.

Intel could not buy AMD as it would get blocked, and the PR optics would be horrible

This provides a clean exit for all concerned.
Intel controls Dell, which controls AMD

Intel gets the AMD GPU tech and some patent licenses.

They spin the AMD parts as the low end in desktops.

Dell gets an insurmountable lead over HP , at least until Intel cuts a bigger deal with Chinese manufacturers.

Most importantly for both, the price competition for CPUs is over.
And will never return.

Re:Checkmate: Intel

[Ant P.]

And then everyone dumps x86 for the cheaper, more power efficient ARM and Intel dies too. One can dream...

Not *ANY*

[saleenS281]

Apple could very easily get away with this. Assuming AMD continues to make advances in their mobile chips, it would actually make perfect sense for Apple. Their users don't give a shit what CPU is inside, and Apple doesn't compete directly on price/performance. It also would be unlikely to prevent other vendors from using the chips. Apple *really* isn't a competitive threat on the desktop side IMO. The only time I see someone comparing an Apple box to a Dell/HP is when they're Linux users trying to decide if they want to make the jump to OSX. If Apple can eek out another 10% margin on their product, it would make a lot of business sense for them to at least consider it.

HP/Dell/et al. might consider Apple a threat on the desktop, but typically a user wants one experience or the other. We might all love to flame about how PC XYZ is cheaper with better specs than the Apple product, but for the average consumer it truly is about the "experience" of owning a Mac (I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit). That experience isn't going to be duplicated buying from one of the big wintel boys.

Re:buying chips only from Intel

[DocSavage64109]

Just this morning in a Microcenter ad, I saw a dell laptop with an AMD cpu: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0355168

Boring

[Quiet_Desperation]

Apple should buy AMD instead, if only for the comedic effect on the tech press and comment boards.

Or a buyout by IBM?

[chemicaldave]

this article makes a case that IBM would be a potential suitor to AMD given their history together.

Well, I'll be........

[Anonymous Coward]

Combine Dell and AMD, and what do you get?

DAMD.

Thanks...

[ardle]

...for stating so accurately the opinions I had been forming :-)
We might end up with PC's with a sticker saying "Dell inside; too much.

No need to insult hard working whores

[Quiet_Desperation]

Or you could stop holding a product "dear" and stop pretending that ideals exist in this world.

Re:No need to insult hard working whores

[unity100]

better is enough for now. noone expects 'ideal' from this societal civilization.

Re:No need to insult hard working whores

[Quiet_Desperation]

I've given up on "better". :-(

Dell Inside

[ardle]

My typo killed the joke ;-)

Worst Deal Possible

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes no sense. First of all HP, Acer, Toshiba etc would be skeptical about buying processors from Dell. It would give Dell an advantage in seeing future product plans of its competitors. In order to be profitable in the semiconductor business you need high volume. Their volume would shrink as PC vendors shied away from AMD processors. I could see Dell buying some of the design resources. When MS ports Windows to Arm it puts AMD in precarious position. Maybe Dell will roll its own Arm processors.

QC

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else worried that AMD will inherit Dell's fine, fine quality control?

dude...you got a dell?

[spidercoz]

what are you, stupid? just take a shit in a box, be about as useful

More games

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Dell do this every once in a while? You know, start rumors about switching 100% to AMD, now they're buying AMD, etc.

In the past it has all been about getting better pricing and support from Intel. Dell has done this numerous times in the past and they're still mostly an Intel shop.

MMm, maybe

[SmallFurryCreature]

1. Antitrust issues? Which ones? Wouldn't this INCREASE competition? One of the biggest INTEL sellers becoming an AMD shop? By your logic Apples switch to Intel should have been against the law as well. No there is no issue on these grounds.

2. MADE Dell successful is correct. Made. They are not nearly as successful as they once were. EVERYONE has done the "chinese production" thing now and chinese factories are just better at it. Dell is no longer the cheap computer supplier out there slashing IT budgets.

3. Who the fuck cares? Really, this one is idiotic. If Dell buys AMD what the fuck do they care about Intel? They would have to be very silly to BUY Amd and continue to sell Intel! The whole idea for Dell to BUY AMD would be to USE AMD, you don't buy a chipmaker then sell someone elses chips.

Even if they want to continue to sell Intel to some, I think that Intel would be the one feeling the squeeze. Previous they could pressure Dell because you had to sell Intel to businesses. If Dell thinks buying AMD is worth it then they obviously think this can be changed. So Intel would have to compete on price not on the badge that goes on the case. They are not used to that.

I think there can be a very simple valid business reason for this all. AMD suffers from not having a huge outlet of its chips. And because of that it can't get a huge contract because it isn't visible enough. A catch 22. How to break out of it? AMD can't unless it becomes its own biggest customer and sells its own PC's.

But what if someone at Dell has thought the same thing. How can you buy AMD on the cheap and then make it big? By making it the sole supplier for one of the biggest PC retailers. Catch 22 solved!

It all depends on this question:

Do companies buy Dell because Intel or do they buy Intel because of Dell

Why is there an intel in your office Dell?

IF Dell believes that is because the company choose a Dell and that just happened to be the CPU in it, then they could easily switch to AMD, make cheaper PC's that perform well enough for the office. AMD would be churning out countless chips at a steady rate solving all its problems and both would go to bigger strengths because of it.

IF people buy a Dell and not an Intel for the office.

That is the question and frankly Dell has spend a LOT of time selling Intel to its customers. Not Dells.

Considering Intel's CPUs beat AMD on pretty much

[falconwolf]

every measure other than price

I don't know about that. I'm about to rebuild a PC, well use the case at least, and I've been looking at various AMD and Intel CPUs. The nomenclature they both use is real confusing but comparing and reading online reviews and comparison tests AMD beats Intel almost always and frequently match if not beat Intel in both actual usage and in benchmarks. Not all the tyme mind you but, guessing here, but maybe in a third of the tests.

Nvidia would be far more likely to suffer if Dell only sold ATI cards in their gaming systems

Dell would be hurt too. Much like other religious technical wars, be it Linux or Windows, Macs or Windows PCs, there's war between fanatics fighting over GPUs like what ATI and Nvidia offer. If Dell went to only using ATI chips they'd lose Nvidia fanatics. Gamers and photographers who say they need Nvidia.

Falcon

So Dell will become the PC equivalent of Apple?

[falconwolf]

Not really. So Dell would have CPUs along with the rest of the hardware. However Dell doesn't have it's own OS/software.

When I read TFA I thought that too, that Dell was becoming another Apple.

Falcon

Re:So Dell will become the PC equivalent of Apple?

[ChunderDownunder]

dell doesn't have an OS but this may see its deployment of Ubuntu ramp up.
A while ago they released some machines using intel and were condemned for the embedded powervr graphics that isn't foss friendly. Go amd - problem gone.

Re:So Dell will become the PC equivalent of Apple?

[falconwolf]

dell doesn't have an OS but this may see its deployment of Ubuntu ramp up.

Dell does ship some PCs with Ubuntu not MS Windows but Dell does not control Ubuntu. Apple compleatly controls Mac OSX, and OSX is only supposed to be installed on Macs. I seem to recall Michael Dell saying back in the '90s, or early 2000s, he'd love to ship Dell PCs with the Mac OS.

A while ago they released some machines using intel and were condemned for the embedded powervr graphics that isn't foss friendly. Go amd - problem gone.

FOSS has problems with both ATI and Nvidia GPUs. Neither releases command controls, or whatever, to allow FOSS developers to write drivers for Linux. ATI does release it's own Linux drivers but they're closed source. And I've heard they have bugs and don't work for all distros.

Falcon

What is it with this double line spacing?

So a screwdriver PC assembly mill buys a high-tech

[melted]

So a screwdriver PC assembly mill buys a high-tech semiconductor manufacturer. Whoever thinks this is a good idea need to go to the doctor and have their head checked to see if there's some kind of degenerative brain disease in progress. Or in fact if there's even a brain in there at all.

Same as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell wants a price cut from Intel and magically a rumor spreads that they might be using AMD, selling AMD, buying AMD, eating AMD, breathing AMD, and then suddenly, as soon as it appeared, the rumor goes away and Dell has its price cut.

I guess the only change up here is that now they can threaten Nvidia too.

Other than that it sounds stupid and if Dell does buy AMD I'd say it was the beginning of the end for AMD.

So, let me see if I grok you here...

[falconwolf]

if you ignore the computers that generate the most revenue for Apple, then Apple looks like it did five years ago, and that's the opposite of Dell buying AMD?

Only if you ignore iOS devices generate 65% of Apple's earnings.

Falcon

Dell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing would make me buy my first Intel cpu since my p133 than Dell owning AMD.

Re:buying chips only from Intel

[JamesP]

Interesting, but look at the specs

2GB memory 250GB HD

That's an entry level computer even here where I live (South America)

I believe Dell began buying AMD for its cheapest computers some time ago.

Re:This could be the greatest merger since AOL-Tim

[arkane1234]

Never did undestand that merger... did they think they were buying the internet or something?

A longer term perspective

[sartin]

To put the AMD price rise into a slightly longer term perspective: If I had stayed at AMD (rather than leaving and dealing with my son's cancer which turned out to be way more fun than working at AMD), the options I got in 2004 would still be underwater.

AMD price history

Re:A longer term perspective

[dave87656]

Sorry to hear about your Son's cancer but it is encouraging to see people devote their lives and energies to help others. You've made the world a better place.

Is it worth it?

[Edsj]

AMD doesn't have it's own fabs anymore. The profit they would get doesn't seem so high and they have all kind of headaches for free like keep an expensive R&D center to keep competitive with other competitors using Intel.

Dell/AMD?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAH! I didn't know AMD was still around. Hell, if Dell wants to buy em then good riddance.

A buy-out? Maybe. Dell? No way

[bwcbwc]

Whatever the merits of AMD's cpus over Intel's, Dell depends on Intel for product segments where AMD is not competitive. Dell isn't going to be able to abandon the high end platforms, and when Sandy Bridge comes back around, Intel will be the big player in the server market again. Dell can't afford to give up that many product lines.

Heck, even HP can't afford to lose Intel, and their product line is a lot more diverse than Dell's.

On the other hand, AMD's executive office changes do point to a buy-out as a possibility. So who would be a buy-out candidate? If we eliminate buyers dependent on Intel and software houses, the future looks pretty bleak for AMD CPUs as a consumer product. A plausible buyer would have to be interested in acquiring a chip design team, a consumer product marketing arm and not much else, since AMD doesn't own their fabs. ARM would be a good match for complementary product lines, but are they big enough to take it on without disrupting their current business? IBM and TI are big enough to buy AMD without a hiccup, but they would probably kill the consumer products and just go for the CPU and GPU technologies. IBM in particular is familiar with AMD through earlier collaborations. A network HW place like Cisco? They are moving into servers, but that would make them more Intel-dependent, not less. Oracle -- Why would they want it?

What's left after this is an Asian buy out, but I don't see where an AMD would fit into the business models of the companies over there.

So IBM, ARM or TI are my top three candidates, but there's a good chance I've missed some other company elsehwere in the world that would match up just as well as these three.

Re:So a screwdriver PC assembly mill buys a high-t

[bwcbwc]

What manufacturer? AMD is a design and marketing house. They sold off their fabs years ago.

DO NOT WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell will no doubt f* up the home-builder market, forcing us to go with the more expensive Intel solutions.

Getting back 2U, sorry for late reply... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1992296&cid=35215882

APK

P.S.=> Better late, than never, so... "just sending you a memo", lol (you brought up some seriously old trivia, I found it both nostalgic, + interesting, (plus, it seems that you're from MY generation or near to it, in PC usage also, which is cool))... apk

Say it isn't so...

[BlueCoder]

This has to be a rumor. A deal like this would take at least six to ten years to go through even after they bought out enough government influence to push it through.

It would make more sense to me if they did a stock exchange deal with buyout prevention. AMD then designing the systems and licensing it to dell at nominal fees. One company does good and then the other does good. It might also form the groundwork for a joint fab and manufacturing arm for dell and AMD.

As an enthusiast I will never buy a Dell computer even though I'm old enough to remember when dell use to be a premium brand and I lusted over their servers. Nor will I ever fail to voice my opinion against dell in any organization I work work since I'm the one that has to deal with the headaches at the end of the day.

If a merger did go through I would jump ship on AMD overnight and I know a lot of other geeks will as well. The AMD legacy will disappear in 10 years and we will only be left with Intel. Intel will be the only one left with cutting edge fabs to make the fastest processors but development will stagnate without a competitor. And a decade or two later the public will be calling for the breakup of Intel.

Geeks like me made AMD the company that it is because we don't like product lock in. Geeks like me will stop recommending AMD products and essentially kill it. I don't buy Apple products but I would gladly buy Apple over Dell.

A buyout doesn't make sense to me unless Dell is working with Intel to destroy market competition or they want to become AMD and go up against Intel themselves. The latter is doubtful but if they did they better change their brand name and retire most of the board of directors. While Intel is the Megacorp we geeks love to hate they do make quality products and take their brand seriously You can for the most part count on Intel hardware to still be working ten years later. Dell vs Intel? My money and hardware investment will be on Intel.

Brands (for the most part at least in my opinion):
Intel - You get what you pay for. Cutting edge, best quality.
AMD - The best price/performance trade off.
Dell - Used car salesman.

Maxius

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the hissy fit intel had over the x86 license when amd spun off its fabs to create global foundries. LET ME MAKE THIS CLEAR THE HUGE HOLE IN A COMPANY BUYING AMD THEORY IS IF AMD IS PURCHASED THE X86 LICENSE IS INVALIDATED. SEEING THAT IT IS NON TRANSFERABLE TO THE NEW COMPANY PERIOD END OF STORY RUMOR DEAD.

Make Dell a Takeover target

[dave87656]

Dell, combined with AMD, could actually make Dell a takeover target by some other cash rich company, perhaps, even a Chinese company, such as Lenova.

Re:It doesn't make sense for any PC vendor. IBM ma

[dave87656]

Any PC Vendor would risk putting itself at a performance disadvantage to it's Intel using competition.

That might be true at the very high end, but in the middle and low-end, AMD enjoys a significant price/performance advantage. I had a chance to compare an AMD Athlon 640 against our Xeon 3440 at work and the AMD came out on top for our DB application (a full DB restore). We are kind of wondering why the machine isn't as fast as Intel seems to claim. YMMV.

Big blue meet big gray...

[hitmark]

So it seems that Dell would want to go IBM? Or am i missing something? Oh right, AMD spun off its production capacity in the form of Global Foundries.

Wow, this is totally ironic.

[klazek]

The whole reason AMD almost died and had to split into ADM (design) and Global Foundries (fab + debt), is that they made a deal with Dell to buy their CPUs and pulled everything from the channel to supply Dell. Dell then backed out and all the little guys who had orders in the channel were left without the cheap and good AMD chipsets they had come to rely upon - i.e. AMD burned all the little guys. So the little guys went to Intel - they had no choice really. AMD, meanwhile, having burned most of its customers and then getting burned itself by Dell, had nowhere to sell their chips. So revenue all but dried up with the customer base more or less gone.

Now Dell might buy AMD? Wow, how things change in just a couple of years. Dell couldn't have planned it better if they had actually planned it (I'm pretty sure they didn't).

warranty is useless

[cheekyboy]

Seriously, ask the supplier, what the failure rate is. If its 2-3% over 12 months, then hell, buy 5% more machines ready offsite or close by to replace any 'dead', cant fix in 15minutes machines.

Thats all the seller does any way, just do full replacements.

And btw, if say said govt dept or giant corporate wants to buy 5000 machines, i think power usage for that alone isnt cheap, and part of the yearly true cost of ownership.

Re:warranty is useless

[Luckyo]

If your hypothesis above was correct, there would be no insurance business as we know it now.

sale

[Anonymous Coward]

what a bunch of B%&l S!^t

lol.

ET wants to buy AMD too.
BTW, did you know that AMD is really a division of Intel (their R&D department)?