Getting closer all the time?
Despite the fact that both AMD and Dell are two of the largest tech companies in Texas, Dell has only begrudgingly warmed to AMD. At Comdex in 1997, Michael Dell and AMD founder Jerry Sanders ran into each other briefly on the show floor. The two shook hands and smiled.
A few moments later, Dell walked over to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com reporters and said, "The problem is that these guys [AMD and another chipmaker, Cyrix] always come in at the end of the cycle. What's the point?"
Starting in 1999, IBM, Gateway, Compaq Computer and others began to adopt the first Athlon processors in consumer desktops, renewing, or in some cases opening, a relationship with AMD. Dell did not. Subsequently, price cuts by Intel prompted many of these companies to drop their AMD boxes.
A slight thaw, however, seemingly began to take place in 2001 and 2002. During those years, Michael Dell and other executives began to state publicly that the company tested AMD parts in its labs. Previously, Dell would often officially decline to discuss the subject.
Dell executives also began to publicly and privately question Intel's Itanium chip, and Dell initially declined to adopt the Itanium 2. Meanwhile, they started to make positive statements about the coming Opteron chip. In April 2002 at a Merrill Lynch conference, Dell and Sanders shook hands and chatted with each other for a while after a speech by Dell.
"We're very interested and we're looking [at Opteron] and there's not much more to say about it in public," said Dell.
For his part, the flamboyant Sanders made a bold prediction that same afternoon. Dell would adopt Hammer, the code name for Opteron at the time, or Intel would come out with a chip that could also perform the same 32-bit/64-bit functions. About six months earlier, Sanders called such a chip from Intel "my worst nightmare".
Unfortunately for AMD, the second half of the prediction came true. After asserting several times that it would not come out with such a chip, Intel in February 2004 announced that it would put 64-bit functionality in Xeon.
"Had Intel not introduced the 64-bit technology when it did, that might have pushed Dell over," said Brookwood, who noted that Intel demonstrated its first 32/64-bit chips on a Dell workstation.
Still, things may be lining up for AMD. Benchmark testers and, more importantly, customers like Sandia National Labs give Opteron high marks. The technical advantages, while modest individually, may begin to accumulate.
And Dell continues to provide optimistic statements about AMD.
"They have been doing better," said Rollins, "than they ever have done before."
