AMD Sale to Dell Rumored

An anonymous reader writes "Advanced Micro Devices may be up for sale. AMD's shares were significantly up yesterday, apparently on rumors that Dell is interested in buying the American multinational semiconductor company. If AMD ends up being bought out, the purchase by Dell, or any other company for that matter, would be among the biggest the technology industry has seen. It would be of course bigger than when AMD bought ATI in 2006."

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[WrongSizeGlass]

Maybe yes, maybe no. The big loser in this would be Intel. I'm not sure of the % of Dell computers that ship with AMD CPU's but it's certainly less than 25%. Dell is big enough to hurt Intel if they switch to AMD.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Nadaka]

Every measure but price? ok...
They certainly use less energy for the performance.
They certainly have higher maximum performance at the top end.

AMD CPU's on the other hand beat most Intel models on price/performance and match Intel's best values (i7 920 and i5 750 last I checked).
What that means is that at almost any given price point, the AMD chip is better than the Intel chip with only a few cases where they are equal.

The only two reasons to buy intel are if you need to use less power or if you want the heavy lifting of a thousand dollar cpu for intense computation or benchmark ego masturbation.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[ElectricTurtle]

Lies. Cheapest core i3 2100 is ~$140, and you'd have to be buying from some potentially unreliable outlet at that, and in no way is its performance equivalent to a Phenom 2 X6 1100T. Look [tomshardware.com] at some real bench aggregates, fanboi. You'll see it can outperform an i7-920 in many applications for fully half the cost. Even though it's a bit slower in games, is 5-10% more speed worth 200% the price? Not to most people.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[sustik]

> If you want the lowest power consumption for the performance, you buy Intel[...]

On newegg I see the following desktop processors:

35W:

Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L 1.8GHz 512KB L2 Cache LGA 775 35W Single-Core Processor BX80557430 $43

45W:

AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core Processor SDX140HBGQBOX
1MB L2 Cache $38

AMD Sempron LE-1250 Sparta 2.2GHz Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor SDH1250IAA4DP 512KB L2 Cache $30

AMD Athlon II X3 400e Rana 2.2GHz Socket AM3 45W Triple-Core Processor AD400EHDGIBOX
3x512KB L2 Cache $100 (Currently out of stock.)

AMD Athlon II X4 610e Propus 2.4GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 45W Quad-Core Desktop Processor AD610EHDGMBOX $140 (Currently out of stock.)

Saying that Intel wins in low power appears to be too broad a statement.