Dell will continue to spurn AMD chips

DELL'S COO Kevin Rollins revealed to a bunch of students that the direct seller would not be using AMD chips to power its PCs.

Rollins claimed the corporate market remains skeptical of the chipmaker's chipmaking prowess.

According to Reuters, Rollins told students at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business: "If you look at the corporate market, which is where 85 percent of our business is today, the corporate user has not yet found confidence in AMD and so most of the corporations use Intel."

He conceded that AMD had "gained a good foothold" in the consumer market but claimed: "That has not been the primary focus of Dell strategically."

But Rollins admitted that Dell is happy to test AMD chippery in its labs and said, "the most recent run of both Athlon and Opteron chips have been better than anything we've seen them do before so we would never say never."

Yet, if AMD's current chips are the best Dell has ever seen. And, if IBM, HP and Sun are happy to deliver AMD-powered systems to their corporate clients, we wonder if "not never" will ever come for Dell.

Perhaps there is some other, mysterious reason for Dell to continue to spurn AMD's advances. Of course, it can't be anything to do with the preferential treatment Dell receives from Intel, nor the co-marketing dollars that flow its way from Intel's well-stocked coffers.

For, if this was the case, you'd imagine that Rollins would help out America's future businessfolk by teling them the whole story. µ