Hewlett-Packard may go Athlon in Europe

Computer manufacturing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) has hinted that it may soon be stocking computers in the Europe with Athlon processors, following the decision by HP to offer Athlon computers in the US.

A quick search for Athlon on the HP site shows that the HP Pavillion 8662C is now available with AMD Athlon 550 MHz processor.

David Brabham product manager for the Pavillion range in the UK infers that HP Europe could soon follow suit. We have already had AMD in our product range for a while. So it would be nothing out of the ordinary if we wanted to take other AMD products."

Brabham also concedes that HP's European policy is strongly effected by US decisions. He adds, "All development and research is done in the US. It's obviously an influence. We do decide products on a country by country basis however."

The other side to this story is that HPs decision to stock Athlons in the first place is a particular insult for Intel, which has been in cahoots with Hewlett-Packard over the development of the IA64 Itanium processor project (previously code-named Merced.) This also comes just weeks after Gateway confessed that it is to offer Athlon computers in both the US and Europe.

If Intel is smarting from this decision, however, it is not showing it. A spokesperson comments: "We don't comment on third party decisions. we believe our products offer excellent value for money and will continue to do so."

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