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."

Bad idea...

[Junta]

For Dell.

We are talking about a chip design company that is at best second-place in most business concerns (GPU sometimes in an exception).

In the CPU industry, you are talking about a move that would severely alienate Intel, a valuable partner in the server arena at the moment. Further complicating things is that a lot of consumer electronics are on the ARM platform, with an ever-increasing chunk, and I don't think AMD has licensed that platform.

On the GPU front, they would be alienating nVidia.

Either by choice or force, you'd see Dell's competitors stop selling AMD products, and maybe medium-term some AMD loyalists will follow Dell, but overall you'd see people giving up on AMD as an invitation for total platform lock-in.

Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.

[Pharmboy]

No, Apple did the exact opposite: Dropped developing their own CPU/MB combos in favor of something that Intel offers and designs for them.

If you look only at Mac computers, and not the iphone, itouch, iwhatever, then Apple is a company that *designs* computers and has created and maintains a popular operating system. They don't actually build the gooey innards for their boxes, ATI (AMD), and Intel do, as well as other parts suppliers.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ElectricTurtle]

You do realize that Dell doesn't sell performance, they sell service and support, right? The whole reason most enterprises choose Dell is not because of the best hardware (it almost never is), but because Dell offers (generally) very efficient replacement of defective parts including but not limited to "free" (the cost is rolled into the retail and/or separate extended warranty) on-site service. It minimizes the enterprise's downtime and costs for internal IT support overhead. Corporate IT doesn't care that Intel offers 10% better performance than AMD at double the cost, they care whether they can keep all their systems up with minimal support overhead and downtime.

Re:The phone is the future anyways

[0123456]

It wont be long before we dock our cell phones in a station and work via KVM at our office desk.

True. Everyone wants a phone with a half-hour battery life, and every company wants employees carrying their work around in their pocket.

Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen.

[ElectricTurtle]

Honestly I think the only people who buy Dell for their personal use are idiots. Dell practically irrumates their corporate customers who are mid-size or better, not just because of the volume of systems, nor extended support packages, but because it's the corporate customers who buy the really big ticket items, the huge multicore servers with a dozen RAID SAS drives. They don't care about Joe Dipshit's $xxx budget desktop that has almost no margin, especially if he doesn't spring for some consumer-grade extended support package.

Computer consumers engaged the market in a race-to-the-bottom, and they won--a market of cheap crap that will last a year or two. They got what they deserved. They put all the mom and pop's that actually cared about the parts they used out of business. I have no respect for any consumer that buys a major brand COTS. Even with laptops the better stuff is a matter of finding a good whitebox chassis and pairing it with quality drives/memory. But (quality) local computer builders are mostly a memory, the few that are left are usually unscrupulous and compete in the same race-to-the-bottom with the addition of retail space overhead.