Rumors Buzz Again About Dell Considering AMD
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Rumors that Dell may be considering Advanced Micro Devices&#39; server chips are again causing a stir. AMD&#39;s stock shot up Friday after press reports quoted Dell Chief Executive Officer Kevin Rollins saying his company is studying the possibility.
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InfoWorld - Dell president and CEO Kevin Rollins indicated that the company is actively considering including AMD processors in its server roster in the foreseeable future.
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&quot;Chief Executive Kevin Rollins said the company was considering using Advanced Micro Devices chips for some future server products, but stressed that Dell had no formal plans as yet to embrace AMD.
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Dell has scaled back the range of consumer PCs with processors from AMD that it sells on its Web site, focussing almost exclusively on systems with Intel processors.Dell&#39;s entire line of AMD-based laptops for consumers, as well as most of its AMD-based consumer desktops, will now be sold only through Dell&#39;s 10,000 retail outlets worldwide, said Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden.Except for one desktop, the Inspiron 531, which includes the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ processor, Dell will focus its online consumer sales on Intel-based PCs. For businesses, Dell will continue to sell a range of AMD-based systems online.The decision, made this week, could be a setback for AMD. The Intel rival received a big boost in 2006 when Dell began offering its chips in desktops, laptops, and servers.AMD-based systems tend to be priced lower than Intel-based systems, so it makes sense for Dell to ship AMD products through retail channels, said Dean McCarron, founder and principal at Mercury Research.&quot;[Dell&#39;s decision] is not that surprising given that AMD&#39;s primary strength is the consumer retail channel,&quot; he said. Price points on PCs tend to be lower in the retail market, and retail buyers are more sensitive to cost than online buyers, McCarron said.AMD said the move was part of a strategy to offer a wider range of AMD-based PCs through retail channels. &quot;We are always evaluating product offerings and how customers can access them,&quot; Camden said.Not many consumers buy systems based on the processor type, she said, and few distinguish between AMD and Intel processors. Users select PCs based mostly on price and what they will use them for, such as surfing the Web or playing music and videos, she said.Dell has expanded its in-store offerings over the past six months by signing up more retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart in the U.S., Tesco in the U.K., and Bic Camera in Japan.The retail strategy helped the company expand its lead over Hewlett-Packard as the largest U.S. PC vendor in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to IDC. However, HP remained the world&#39;s largest PC dealer, topping Dell, Acer and Lenovo, IDC said.Hewlett-Packard already offers more AMD-based PCs in retail than online, so Dell&#39;s decision isn&#39;t a first, McCarron said. Until it won over top-tier PC vendors several years ago, AMD relied on the retail market and white-box vendors for its chip sales.The effect of Dell&#39;s strategy shift on AMD remains to be seen, McCarron said. It is a large and important PC vendor, but it is also a relatively new partner for AMD.AMD has suffered some setbacks recently, reporting five straight quarterly losses and delaying shipments of some new desktop and server processors. Its market share was 23 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, down a fraction from the year before, while Intel&#39;s market share climbed slightly to 77 percent, according to IDC.
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Confusion in PowerEdge-land Who makes the Opteron processors going into Dell's latest rackable servers? AMD, you'd think, but a casual glance at the PC giant's website might leave you with the impression that the processors were produced by AMD's arch-rival, Intel.â¦
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Getting a little chilly down there, Satan? Yes, infernal ice-skating may soon become possible, following Dell CEO Kevin Rollins&#39; admission that the computer giant is close to signing up AMD as a processor supplier.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices' move to cut overhead costs by outsourcing its chip manufacturing business may backfire in the long run, according to several analysts who have downgraded the company's stock. AMD is struggling it keep its head above water after posting losses of $611 million and $574 million for its past two quarters. The company has also drawn criticism for its manufacturing, with recent reports that it will delay the full-volume launch of the "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip from July to October. That would hobble AMD in its effort to compete with surging rival Intel. Although AMD's Opteron has won over many users of Intel's Xeon server chips since its launch in 2003, that trend is now in a sharp reversal, according to a June 13 report from Jon Peddie Research. In the market for workstation processors, AMD had pushed Intel's share down to 87.6 percent in the first quarter of 2006, but Intel has rebounded since then, reaching 92 percent share in the first quarter of 2007. The building pressure recently prompted some analysts to predict that AMD might stop manufacturing any chips at all and convert to a fully outsourced business model as soon as 2008. AMD said that rumor had come from a "speculative" Goldman Sachs report, but confirmed that the company is trying to focus its efforts on developing chips instead of manufacturing them, according to AMD spokesman Drew Prarie. AMD currently has a deal giving it access to IBM's chip fabrication plant in East Fishkill, New York. Under that arrangement, AMD can perform much of its research and development without having to incur the cost of owning its own manufacturing plant, he said. "We're looking to find ways to extend that model beyond research and development to the full range of the manufacturing supply chain," Prarie said Monday. "That could run the range from increasing the amount of processors we send out for chartered manufacturing, and could also include things like establishing partnerships on the manufacturing side." AMD has already taken some steps in this direction. In 2006, AMD announced a plan to give Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing a heavier load, asking the firm to begin making the new 65-nanometer scale Athlon chips and other processors. And in May, AMD announced that it hadÂ awarded the job of manufacturing its newest graphics chips to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Now the company may be preparing to expand that model, according to a June 17 report from Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung. AMD is on the verge of making a "transformational move" such as outsourcing a larger share of low-end processors to TSMC, selling a share of the manufacturing capacity in its Fab 30 chip-making plant in Dresden, Germany, or even selling a share in its planned $3.2 billion chip plant in Saratoga County, New York, Yeung wrote. Despite AMD's insistence that such an arrangement would simply allow it to stay in the chip business while cutting costs, the uncertainty makes Wall Street analysts nervous. The Citigroup report lowered its estimate of AMD's future revenue from $1.3 billion to $1.1 billion for the second quarter, and from $5.8 billion to $5.6 billion for the full year of 2007. Those figures would represent a flat performance compared to AMD's performance last year, with $1.22 billion of revenue in the second quarter of 2006 and $5.6 billion for the full year. "We are again lowering AMD estimates, this time for 2Q07 (we had previously lowered 2H07), reflecting our field checks suggesting current conditions are weak," Yeung wrote. While Citigroup recognizes that AMD could be moving away from its own manufacturing and that could help the company cut costs, "we remain on hold for the shares given near-term weakness," he wrote. In contrast, Yeung said Intel would continue to enjoy a competitive advantage thanks to theÂ potential delay of AMD's Barcelona chips, the rising popularity of Intel's new Santa Rosa notebook platform, and the continued sales of Core-family chips for desktop PCs.
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'Not an open system' Dell is considering an authorised resellers program for Europe, after taking the plunge into the channel in the US.â¦
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On sale now, if you know where to look Online retailers have been listing AMD's anticipated Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3GHz processor for a wee while now, but it appears the part has now begun shipping, to one reseller at least. The chip wasn't expected to go on sale until next month.â¦
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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By Yager, Tom  Investors and the SEC are going after Dell, but it shouldn't have to take the rap alone  I WROTE A COLUMN IN 2005 CALLED "HOW will Dell Offset the Loss of Intel's Generosity?" (infoworld.com/5060).
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Novell's SuSE software is set to join Red Hat as a server option. Also: Is AMD in Dell's future?
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Will a splash of color boost Dell's bottom line?
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(InfoWorld) - One of the biggest rumors to come out of Computex this week is that Intel is developing a new high-end graphics processor, which it will begin sampling to graphics cards makers in Taiwan in the next year or two. Graphics card makers at the show said they've seen no signs of it, however. The rumor follows reports of Intel hiring more graphics chip engineers, and speculation that Intel will have to answer Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD's)Â purchase of GPU maker ATI TechnologiesÂ last year. AMD is developing a family of microprocessors with graphics built in,Â called Fusion. Some also speculate that Intel will need to buy a graphics processor company to bolster its expertise in GPUs. Intel already makes graphics cores, but they are generally used in chip sets for PCs aimed at users who are not looking for high end graphics. In fact, Intel is the world's largest graphics chip maker, but it has never gone after the high-end segment of the business, which has long been dominated by NvidiaÂ and ATI. The only major announcement Intel has made recently about graphics is building the function intoÂ a future multicore chip code-named Larrabee. The chip, which will pack dozens of x86 microprocessors onto a single piece of silicon, is under development. The company may eventually take a swing at the high-end GPU business, but several graphics card makers at Computex say they've seen no sign of such a move yet. "There have been rumors of an Intel GPU for a long time. I haven't seen anything like it yet," said Andy Wu, project engineer in the multimedia division at Micro-Star International, one of Taiwan's largest graphics card makers. "It would be big news if it were true, but it's not real," said Andrew Wei, graphics product manager at Foxconn Technology Group, another graphics card maker. An engineer at Asustek Computer, Taiwan's largest motherboard maker and a major graphics card developer, also denied the existence of an Intel GPU or any hearsay that one might be coming anytime soon. Grace Wang, regional marketing manager for Intel's Asia Pacific platform component group, said Larrabee is the only major graphics project Intel has announced recently, and declined to comment on any other product plans. Intel held 38.7 percent of the graphics chip market at the end of the first quarter, followed by Nvidia with 28.5 percent and AMD with 21.9 percent, according to Jon Peddie Research. Â
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The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Analysts are suggesting that AMD may be forced to delay its Barcelona multi-core chip, a move that could set the company back both financially and strategically.
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The speculation regarding Dell building a new handset starts up again.