AMD and Dell sign deal for millions of chips

WE HAVE LEARNED of a knees-up held in Mikey's Dell house in Texas, where execs from AMD and Dell gathered in and around the hot tub, to browse through a wodge of legal papers.

The shindig marked the signing of a pact between the one-time Intel-only computer-maker and the upstart chip maker.

And it appears that AMD just pulled biggest coup in the history of chippery, whatever it turns out in sales results.

The event was concluded with a deal about "No Leaks" policy, but the magnitude of the news was such in both companies that there was no way it wouldn't get to lower segments of the company.

According to our molars, Dell's AMD-powered offerings will include the full range of desktops, notebooks, workstations with a clear marketing focus on student notebooks for an initial Back-To-School line-up.

The AMD-Dell deal not only includes 4P servers or 2P servers but is more focused on desktop and notebook side of things. The CPUs in question are single and dual-core Athlon 64s, Semprons and of course, Opterons. While we have no information about the timings new line of Dell XPS desktops, the notebook side of the thing is getting prepped as we right now.

The computers will be advertised as "Windows Vista Premium Ready", and the graphics mix is likely to come from Nvidia side for now.

ATI will be in with a sniff too, since Dell will use Captain Canuck's components in Intel and AMD mobile SKUs.

The workstation deal is pretty simple to understand: AMD is a favourite in Hollywood and is making great strides in other industries as well. The Opteron Quadro combo has been taking market share for years, and Dell did not like the look on the combination in IBM and HP offerings, yet alone specialist companies like Boxx Technologies.

If you're still wondering why a market-share leading company like Dell might take the risk and go the competitor's route at the time when new marchitecture from its primary partner is probably set to rock the world, there is only one simple reason: Supply.

Dell can get Conroes and a great share of WoodCrests and take a ticket to stand in line for Meroms, which are scheduled to be split between Apple and Lenovo. No other manufacturer will get anywhere near the volumes of these two, and Dell just does not like to be on a short leash. Especially if it spends valuable TV air-time and paper ads on products that look likely to be put on a back-order.

This autumn is gearing up to be the most interesting one in a long time. And the AMD-Dell deal looks likely to stay.