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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."
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.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
*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
People, what a bunch of bastards
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. =/
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We would then have GPUs and CPUs with that world renowned Dell quality.
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I wonder how much it costs to start rumors like that whilst selling the stock short from another country.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Oh, wait. . . nevermind.
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).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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
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.
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."
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
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?