Dell, who has always been a huge Intel supporter, may now be leaning towards using AMD's 64bit Opteron processors in their servers. While Dell has made no firm commitments as of yet, they have confirmed this as a possibility. Dell expects to come to a decision by the end of this year.

The first indication from Dell that the AMD Opteron MPU was being considered appeared in the New York Times last Sunday, in a story on Intel's Itanium processor. That story contained comments by Randy Groves, vice president for the enterprise systems group, that "This is the first time AMD has had a value proposition that is more than just price. That's something we have to take seriously." The Dell spokesman confirmed the quote today.