Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, Rollins admitted that Round Rock, Texas-based Dell had seriously considered AMD’s processors last year, but now believes Intel Corp has regained some ground technologically.
Is AMD going to be successful? Probably, and they’ve done some nice things, said Rollins, and they are making some headway. Do I think that’s going to be enough to have to move off? Now it’s looking like no, for a while it was looking like yes.
In November 2004, Rollins admitted that Dell had a more favorable disposition to Sunnyvale, California-based AMD based on its advancements in high-performance computing and 64-bit memory extensions.
These advancements have seen AMD’s processors adopted by all the major server vendors including Hewlett-Packard Co last year, as well as the major software vendors including Microsoft Corp. Dell, though has stayed true to Intel, which has caught up with its EM64T extension technology, making a move to AMD’s Opteron’s unnecessary, according to Rollins.
We believe that Intel acknowledged challenges, got their engineers fired up and have been steadily improving their technological roadmap vis-a-vis AMD, he said. That’s now starting to put customers a bit more at ease that they don’t have to make a shift.
While Dell is sticking with Intel for now, Rollins said the company’s partnerships depend on economic and customer requirements, making it clear that the door is not completely closed to AMD.
Our whole goal is never a religious goal, it’s always an economic and customer goal, he said. As long as we can meet the economic needs of our shareholders and as long as we meet the technological need for customers, we’re fine. When one of our partners slips on the economics or they slip in terms of the technology, that causes us great concern. For a while Intel admittedly slipped technologically and AMD had stepped forward, and we were seeing that in terms of customer response and requests. When that happens you’re going to see us respond, there’s no magic there, you’re going to see us respond.
