Intel Inside holds up Dell Opteron adoption

THERE'S NO SMOKE without fire, and Dell has been in deep discussions with AMD over its Opteron microprocessors.

But according to reliable sources here at the Intel Developer Forum there's one thing holding it up, and that's the Intel Inside programme.

For those who don't know what this is, this is the cooperative marketing funding campaign Intel set up a decade or so ago.

Now Dell is deeply embedded with Intel and you might be surprised to hear that the Inside campaign is worth several hundreds of millions of dollar to the PC maker.

IBM is also in a similar position with the Intel Inside campaign.

Is Dell worried about falling behind on the server stakes? Our reliable sources reckon that yes, it is. But with Intel contributing so much to Dell's bottom line, is it any wonder that this is a hard decision to make?