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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."
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.
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. =/
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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