AMD Sale to Dell Rumored 325
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."
Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Dell considering making a more integrated kind of product line? Talk about a change in strategy.
And a damn good one it would be. I can't even begin to imagine the profits Dell could reap through the fruits inherited from an AMD buyout. It's much cheaper to manufacture products when you control every aspect of most of the primary components being used. And then also manufacturing facilities.. well, even more so.. wow.
Can they actually do this ..? (Score:5, Interesting)
There might be something similar going on with ATI vs nvidia as well. =/
Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Add this to the fact that using their own product to build all their systems would save them quite a bit on every CPU and video card they bundle in a sold system means that this could be a big deal for Dell.
Now, all that aside, I don't know how I feel about Dell owning AMD/ATI. However, it could push AMD into more marketshare which means more R&D and as long as Dell still sells wholesale, too, it might not be so bad.
Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see. HP has a WebOS PC coming out. Dell buys AMD...
My guess is they're both moving towards Apple's model. Could a real Dell-customized Linux desktop be far off?
Its about Storage (Score:2, Interesting)
This makes total sense, this is about storage. Dell has made some other purchases recently of storage vendors, and has a line of x86 based iscsi mid level SAN products they are seeking to push.
AMD has the right technology for that. You don't need powerful number crunching and the crunching you do need could be optimized easily in the hardware. What AMD offers is good bus and memory architectures that would serve well in those more integrated applications. I suspect this is a way for Dell to continue to leverage their existing technology while giving themselves a say in the development of the features in x86,AMD64 architecture processors and their support chips. They will use that say to get the stuff they want for storage controllers.
Unsubstantiated rumor (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to be in the minority, but I do not think the merger is viable
1) Antitrust issues: Normally I would scoff at the U.S. gov't stepping in and stopping and anti-competitive merger. This, however, is very high profile and would impace Intel and U.S. business as a whole. I think the private sector would push hard enough that the gov't would have to act.
2) This is antithetical to what has made Dell successful. Dell does not want to be in the business of owning production. They want to be a middle person, putting their brand on items, finding efficiencies in distribution and doing very well at it. Owning production is a different game altogether.
3) Dell would damage their relationship with Intel. As long as Dell is independent they can negotiate hard with Intel and cooperate to ensure that product offerings integrate well with Intel's products. Intel is less likely to want to do business with Dell in a cooperative sense.
Overall, I think this rumor is just a rumor. Course, I've been wrong before, and businesses have done some boneheaded moves.
Re:Extremely Risky, won't happen. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not necessarily - average PC buyers do not buy on actual performance, and haven't for years. See: Pentium 4 sales - the NetBurst architecture that didn't perform anywhere close to as good as what AMD was offering at the time, yet everyone bought them because of the Intel brand at a higher price.
Intel's been building a massive brand recognition since the 486, even though the vast majority of PC buyers couldn't even tell you what Intel makes other than "chips".
It wouldn't be that hard for Dell to just sell the Dell brand, regardless of what's inside the box. They've already been doing that with their shoddy dielectric-bursting capacitors as it is.
It doesn't make sense for any PC vendor. IBM maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Any PC Vendor would risk putting itself at a performance disadvantage to it's Intel using competition.
Not only that, it would make competing PC vendors leery of using AMD chips.
This would be massive strategic failure for any PC vendor, hastening the slide of both the vendor business and the CPU business.
There are few potential companies that might have a good fit. IBM might be one. IBM might have the silicon expertise, funds and neutrality to keep AMD viable in the CPU industry.
Rumors (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable. (Score:4, Interesting)
I considered such ratios when building my latest low-power machine... until I figured out that with the focus of "low-power", most of the time, it's just a wattage ceiling that I need, not a strong ratio. Once I realized that, it was just a filtering job of:
hide all processors over 65w
hide all processors with one core
hide all processors over $125 (I'm a budget builder)
Within that group, find the best relative computing power.