AMD still in at Dell

Major changes are afoot at Dell, following the departure of its CEO, Kevin Rollins and the return of founder Michael Dell as the company’s chief executive. But one thing that will not waver is the company’s use of Advanced Micro Devices’ processors, it has been revealed. Dell will complete the rollout of its dual-processor supplier strategy, Mr. Dell said in a memo he penned last Friday. The memo, obtained by the Austin Statesman newspaper is available here:   Link.

Dell adopted AMD Athlon, Sempron, Opteron and Turion chips in its desktops, its servers and then its notebooks, beginning in September 2006. Dell heavily advertised its Turion-equipped Inspiron notebooks during the 2006 holiday season, for example. Anecdotal evidence told me it was shipping a fair number of AMD desktops as well. During a visit to the company’s desktop PC manufacturing plant in Round Rock, Texas, in mid-December, I watched as a worker assembled Dimension after Dimension, each with an Athlon processors inside. Granted, I was only there to witness a few minutes of the day. But, in that time, I saw nary an Intel chip.

Mr. Dell doesn’t name Intel or AMD in his memo. However it’s clear what he’s talking about. Despite its broad and rapid—although belated to the chagrin of many of its customers—adoption of AMD processors, Dell still doesn’t offer the chips as broadly as its chief competitor, Hewlett-Packard. It looks like Mr. Dell has set out to change that, soon.