During his appearance in New York yesterday at the Citigroup Global Technology Conference, Michael Dell answered a question about whether his company's move last year to build systems with chips made by Advanced Micro Devices -- after two decades as an Intel-only shop -- was the right decision.
Dell said, in words and substance, it was the only decision:
Next week, AMD will introduce their Barcelona four-core processor. And Barcelona competes with the Intel Clovertown chip. And if you look at floating point instructions, Barcelona is about 30 percent faster than Clovertown. However, if you look at integer instructions, Clovertown is about 30 percent faster than Barcelona. So depending on the type of application you're running or maybe (because of) your theory of computer science, you might have a preference for one type of server or another type of server.
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It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to only have one of those choices. So we have quite a complete spectrum of both "A" and "I" flavors and we'll continue to do that. We're definitely running the business around customer preference and how do we optimize our ability to drive profitable growth for the long term. And we think having two suppliers is absolutely in our best interest.
With AMD losing top sales executives, including Henri Richard last month, Dell's comments could be a shot in the arm for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker. Unless, of course, there are more people in the market who favor the integer theory of computer science.
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