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I would not trust Dell's submission.

Dell reckon AMD's gear back in 2006 were underperforming which contrasts my Opteron experiences. Also, Intel have been late to the technology/innovation party.
e.g. Intel recently (2008) cloned AMD's direct connected architecture about 4 years after AMD had introduced it in Opteron platform.
And, Intel is about 10 times bigger than AMD (assets wise).

There has been a strong affinity between Dell and AMD for quite a while before the Opteron platform surfaced.
e.g. Back in 2000 when Michael Dell was saying AMD's Athlon CPUs were "too fragile".

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Michael-Dell-AMD-technology-too-fr...

Back then, the Athlon K7 CPU platform was known for it's better gaming ability. I remember reading years ago that the unreal tournament coders would order custom built Athlon boxes for development of Unreal Tournament engine/game. AMD had more advanced floating point hardware and could handle running hotter while producing the better performance. This is fine as long as you used good components such as good quality power supply, memory modules, motherboard, etc. However, back then, this did not suit Dell's platform since it would have increased their prices (the higher quality, but more costly, parts you'd want to use with an AMD box were overkill for an Intel box).

But then again if you owned a Porsche, would you buy Porsche mechanical parts or non-Porsche cloned-parts.

The same with AMD boxes ... you would pay extra for the higher quality components to ensure that you had the better computing experience.

Then again, why is it only Dell had something to say about AMD an no one else (e.g. Compaq, HP, IBM, Sun, etc.).

Later, Dell started selling Opteron systems.

This article (May 2006)

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1021324/why-dell-now-does-...

is a reminder of how AMD's Opteron platfrom caught Dell/Intel with their pant's down.




Telos