kpf - the Dell deal.
I was not all that surprised to see IBM launch AMD Opteron. AMD has a manufacturing agreement with them. I was however extremely surprised to see HP adopt AMD Opteron. Afterall they did develop the Itanium with Intel. The Sun adoption of AMD Opteron was clear – what else should Sun have done? Sun and AMD are a perfect match. The snowball kinda kept rolling after that… and I firmly believe it rolled right into Dell’s HQ too.
Kevin Rollins, Dell’s CEO and president, is saying some pretty powerful stuff. He publicly says that AMD (in some areas, the areas Dell wants to adopt) is superior to Intel. Had he said it once, by a mistake or an optimistic but wrong quote, that had been one thing, but he said it twice. He cannot go back on that. How can Dell go back on that statement? In my opinion they cannot. The statement was designed to prepare chip-land and Dell’s customers for the tech-power shift of the decade – Dell is going AMD. Big!
Add to that the 30 new Opteron designs in Q1 2005 (from AMD Analyst Day) thing, Sanmina joining the AMD Validated Server Program, and Broadcom’s new focus on AMD Opteron chipsets, the Chartered Manufacturing Agreement, and a few other hints and the conclusion becomes even clearer.
I am 90% sure the AMD/Dell deal is already in the bag. I expect an official PR for a Q1 2005 launch.
- HellraiserDK
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