It's official: Dell doesn't have an exclusive deal with Intel, and has an open mind on using AMD processors in its products.

So said company chairman Michael Dell last week when cornered by a Reuters reporter at the World Economic Forum event in Davos, Switzerland. "Sure," he said when asked if the company might offer Opteron and/or Athlon-based machines. "We do not have an exclusive relationship with Intel."

However, "I do not have any new product to announce today", Dell added.

Unsurprisingly, Dell's comments were met with a host of 'it's going to happen!' calls from AMD fanboys, and a comparable quantity of 'it'll never happen' yells from the Intel supporters. What we can say is that Dell will continue to offer up 'it might happen' statements, just as it's been doing for the past four years or so - all of which, we note, have raised hopes but never materialised.

Is there anything different this time round? Well, AMD's processors, particularly those aimed at servers, are increasingly in demand, and that might just swing it for AMD to win Dell's business. Then again, the incentives to stick with Intel remain in place as they always have done. Given Opteron's success they may even be more tempting, especially with juicy next-gen architecture-based server chips getting ever closer. ®