Michael Dell and new best buddy, AMD's Hector Ruiz, cozied up on stage today at Oracle OpenWorld to celebrate customer choice.

While they didn't mention Intel by name, AMD's arch-rival was the butt of some badly-scripted managerial improv intended to highlight the wisdom of hardware vendors in picking AMD too. Michael Dell is expected to elaborate on Dell's new union with AMD - which includes fresh server and PC products - Monday afternoon during his own OpenWorld keynote.

Faced with stuttering sales and falling profits, Dell in May became the last big-name OEM to work with AMD, ending an exclusive relationship with Intel.

Admittedly, Dell's first embrace with AMD was less than wholehearted, with the company restricting itself to building quad-socket Opteron servers. Since then, Dell has bought on more AMD-based server and PC products, on its own account, and through its Alienware subsidiary. But questions remain over how deep its love runs for AMD.

Hence, AMD CEO and chairman Ruiz welcomed Dell on stage Monday morning with a fine line in understatement: "I'm sure you've been getting as many questions as I have about AMD and Dell joining forces."

According to Dell and Ruiz, the future of the companies' relationship is virtualization. "Virtualization is going to be increasingly important as AMD puts more processing power into a CPU... allowing customers to protect applications and multiple operating systems from each other," Dell said

"AMD and Dell both understand the needs of the enterprise. The ability to operate in this new virtualized environment. Dell using AMD virtualization technology is going to assist enterprises to streamline the datacenter and achieve greater efficiencies," Ruiz added.

And that was it. After a faux TV-teaser for this afternoon's news, Michael left the stage to the University of Texas's anthem, The eyes of Texas. ®

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