Dell takes a swipe at HP

Michael Dell stressed the benefits of making and selling PCs in his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, in contrast to his company's chief rival HP which has mulled spinning off its PC division.

Dell, chief executive of Dell, said on Tuesday that economies of scale from building PCs helped Dell keep component costs for servers low and alluded to HP's statement about potentially spinning off its Personal Systems Group.

"There are many reasons to stay committed to personal computing," Dell said. "It seems these days not everyone is so totally committed... [HP] used to say the computer is personal again. I guess you might take that personally if you brought a PC from them."

95 percent of all disks and processors sold find their way into PCs and the other five percent goes into servers and storage, he said, so by building PCs Dell generates so much demand for these components that prices are kept low.

"Another benefit is that you're able to deliver an entire solution, you can optimise everything end-to-end," he said.

Dell's disparaging comments about HP were an expansion on ones he made to the Financial Times in early September.

New PowerEdges due in 2012

Dell also used the keynote to say that the twelfth generation of PowerEdge servers should arrive in the first quarter of 2012. They will have two terabytes of memory and will have flash integrated into them to speed data retrieval and processing.

"We're architecting tier-zero [flash] storage right into our systems from the beginning," Dell said. "You can't get any closer to the CPU and any faster."