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Dell has no plans to use AMD chips in its products

By Reuters
Chicago, 19 Feb 2004

Dell, the world`s number two personal computer maker, said yesterday that it had no plans to use Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chips in its products, as corporate customers are not asking for them.

Dell will stick to using chips made by Intel in its desktop, laptop computers and servers, Dell president and COO Kevin Rollins told students at the University of Chicago`s Graduate School of Business.

"If you look at the corporate market, which is where 85% of our business is today, the corporate user has not yet found confidence in AMD and so most of the corporations use Intel," he said. "Where AMD has gained a good foothold is in the consumer space. That has not been the primary focus of Dell strategically."

He added, however, that Dell tests every AMD chip, including its new 64-bit Opteron processor, in its labs.

"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," Rollins said of Sunnyvale, California-based AMD.

IBM and Sun Microsystems already sell servers using AMD`s Opteron chip. HP will begin using the chips in server computers, Reuters reported in January, citing sources familiar with the matter. Analysts have waited to see if Dell would follow suit.

Opteron, like Intel`s far more expensive 64-bit Itanium chip, crunches 64 bits of data at a time compared with the 32-bits processed at once in the ubiquitous Intel-standard, or x86 chips. Opteron and Itanium are faster at data-intensive computer uses than the 32-bit variety that Intel`s Xeon server chips represent.

Opteron, which launched in April 2003, has been adopted not only by major vendors such as IBM, but also by a wide range of second-tier, or "white box" server makers.

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