Domino Dell denies it will use AMD chips

Fevered speculation that Dell, a major distributor of Intel technology, might be the last domino to fall to AMD with its Athlon microprocessor, was dampened down by an executive at the PC firm late yesterday. Kevin Rollins, a vice chairman at the Dull Corporation, told the Reuters wire that the reports were not true. He confirmed that Dell regularly met with officials from AMD, as reported here previously, but said the meetings were just that, meetings. An insider at AMD confirmed this was the state of affairs to us earlier this week, rather cynically observing that Dell liked Intel to see the name of the rival company in its visitor book, just to keep Chipzilla on its toes. However, AMD's share price continued to rise on Wall Street yesterday, boosted by inaccurate news stories as well as promises of loot to come when the firm releases its figures on April 12th. Its share price closed at $71 when the night watchman arrived. The day before, the share price had risen by $7.25, heady heights from the $16 that it trundled along at for Q2-Q3 of last year. Meanwhile, a senior executive at AMD's plant in Dresden, the self-styled Home of the Copper Whopper, provided market figures for his firm which suggest it has done better than anyone expected. Jens Drews, PR executive at Fab 30 in Saxony, provided The Register with some worldwide figures. He said: "In Europe, our market share is the about the same as in Japan (20 per cent). Worldwide, we came in at about 15 per cent in Q3 and Q4 99 according to Mercury Research. That means, the US numbers [which were provided in an earlier story, Ed] are also way off. After all, we sold about 18 to 19 million K6 and one million AMD Athlon in 1999." However, the figures Drews supplied may not be totally differerent from those we provided in our earlier story. We were referring to its share in the high end desktop market, and as far as we are aware, there is no independent market research which gives those figures. We suspect, however, that AMD has done particularly well with the Athlon in the last three months, given feedback from both the component distribution channel and independent PC vendors. ®