Dell buys tons of AMD graphics chips

AMD'S R6xx SERIES may be having a troubled birth, but the amount of these babies that are being sold numbers in the millions. This is welcome news for AMD, a company that had to revise financial guidance for this year and announce restructuring.

As yet unlaunched, its DX10 entry-level chip, R(V)610 is already set to become the fastest-selling graphics chip of all time. OEMs just went beserk for these cards, able to bring Vista capabilities and gaming at baseline resolutions for a very affordable price, thanks to 65nm manufacturing process at TSMC.

The biggest buyer is none other than the company from Round Rock, TX. Dell went out and bought all the chips it could get. The company wants to have a DirectX10 push across the board, and needed WHQL drivers for every part of its product line-up. AMD received its R600/610/630 WHQL driver for Vista a long time ago, so it was a non-issue for the "three sticker" program (Every PC brand is enrolled in the three-sticker programme, where up to three stickers are placed on every computer in exchange for money... marketing incentives).

According to pur sources, Dell wanted just about every 65nm GPU that AMD will launch to the world in very early May, following the Tech Day in Tunisia. And it had the readies ready.

R(V)630 is no slouch either, and the integration of Xilleon video processing technology into the GPUs was a golden move for AMD, because a massive amount of consumer electronic companies already use this chip in their LCD/Plasma TVs.

With Xilleon tech inside desktop and notebook parts, expect a lot of crossover devices to feature exactly these graphics chips. It could happen that AMD ships more than 100 million 65nm GPUs by the end of 2007, but this is a very optimistic forecast. µ