You may have just noticed as well that Dell has quietly started to sell AMD based PCs, shortly after the AMD partnership annoucement a few days ago. This is a long-awaited good news to the PC industry.
Healthy competition makes a huge difference in pushing the best technology forward. The competition from AMD has been the only challenge to Intel’s dominance for the last a couple of decades. It has never been quite the level playing field due to the tremendous size and marketing muscle Intel possesses. Without AMD, Intel will probably force everyone to use the slow and power-hungry Itanium 64 chips instead of the Pentium-M based Core Duo and Core 2 Duo.
Dell has long recognized the market demand of AMD-based PCs. A simple market research in the DIY market will show the popularity of AMD-based mobo vs the Intel counterpart for their price and performance. But I guess it had been hard to part with Intel’s lucrative co-marketing moolah. It is so lucrative, in fact, it pretty much gives all the additional CPUs away to Dell once it reaches certain volume. Therefore it effectively smothered any incentive for Dell to seek alternative vendors.
Dell has long been a data-driven sales company. So what triggered this change of heart has everything to do with what happens in the corporate data centers. Many other vendors are not as loyal to Intel as Dell. For example HP has been offering both AMD and Intel-based servers. Since a few missteps by Intel regarding the 64-bit strategy, orders for AMD Opteron-based servers have been in a steady climb to the point that helped HP to overtake Dell as the biggest PC vendor. That finally got Dell’s attention – I guess the size and success of Dell has made it less nimble after all. But it is never too late to change course.