AMD Dell deal is a big Dell deal indeed

[Alpine]

Desktops, laptops, and servers



WE KEEP HEARING about the secretive Dell AMD deal, but no one is talking anything serious, and most reports are just smoke and mirrors.

If I am going to have to wear a bunny suit, I am going to know why, damn it. The short story is all signs point to this deal being huge, and I mean well into double digit percentages of Dell shipments from the early stages.

A wise but nameless man was talking to me about AMD's plans at Computex last year, just about the time when Turion notebooks were actually poking their heads out of the ground after a long winter. He said that AMD had a long term plan, first servers, then laptops, then desktops. They were on servers, and I was seeing laptops. I corrected him and said 'don't you mean servers, desktops and then laptops, you already own the retail desktop market'. He grinned. Silly reporter, no cookie.



The desktop assault begins now. You saw the Lenovo deal, and various other bits and pieces, but it is time for the real launch to begin soon. The raw numbers we hear are above 10 million CPUs, but the time frame keeps changing. Some people say hard targets of three to four million CPUs a quarter, other give mildly different variations. Several sources are pointing at 33-50% of Dell business desktops in the near future. This deal is as big as you can get, and will cut across servers, desktops and laptops.

If you do the sums, and about 60 million CPUs are sold a quarter, this will boost AMD's market share by about five points or so, pushing it perilously close to the 30% it keeps talking about. This is going to change a lot of long held beliefs about what the industry is, and who holds what power.

AMD can't really compete on raw power once Core2SquaredDuoDeuxWhatever ramps, but can compete on price. Looking at the numbers from the excellent HP 63xx line series laptops, the AMD price advantage is $180, not an insubstantial sum. If you are buying 1,000 of them, do you worry about 30 minutes battery life or a 15 plus per cent discount? AMD is going to do the same in Dell laptops, and may be able to significantly undercut Intel there too. The end result, if it is only half as big as we are hearing, will drive huge business to AMD, Nvidia and of course ATI, which makes the timing of the buy pretty fortuitous. If you doubt this is anything less than game changing and huge, ask yourself how stupid this man is.

The INquirer