Don't expect many AMD chips in our products, says Dell

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AMD's Ryzen chips will remain a rarity in Dell EMC's products, Channel Pro has learned, despite the new silicon finding favour with buyers.

For the past several years, the processor market has been utterly dominated by Intel, with previous rivals AMD fading to near-insignificance. Last year, however, AMD came back with a bang, launching their new Ryzen chipset to much fanfare.

The new chips have been a hit with fans and customers, thanks to their more affordable pricing and powerful multithreaded performance. Ryzen chips have started appearing in more and more hardware, including servers, workstations and gaming PCs from large manufacturers.

Dell EMC is no exception, integrating AMD processors into workstations, all-in-one devices and even servers . However, CTO John Roese told IT Pro that these products will be an exception within Dell's lineup, and the company won't offer large numbers of AMD-powered machines any time soon.

"Make no mistake about it," he said at MWC in Barcelona today, "Intel is the big player, AMD is the second player. There's enough diversity between them that there are use cases to have them both in our portfolio, but just the sheer breadth of the Intel processor portfolio is massive compared to even the accelerated AMD world."

According to Roese, while AMD still absolutely has a place in the processor market, the number of different models offered by Intel means that there is little value in producing an AMD-powered variant of every product in its portfolio.

"AMD is doing some interesting things, and by adding them to the portfolio we pick up a few extra areas, but let's be very clear: there is a huge, dominant player in compute semiconductors, and then there is a challenger which is doing some very good innovative work called AMD, but the gap between them is quite large in terms of market share and use-cases. So our portfolio is not going to change in any meaningful way."

"Don't expect it to be a duopoly any time soon."

Adam Shepherd

Adam Shepherd has been a technology journalist since 2015, covering everything from cloud storage and security, to smartphones and servers. Over the course of his career, he’s seen the spread of 5G, the growing ubiquity of wireless devices, and the start of the connected revolution. He’s also been to more trade shows and technology conferences than he cares to count.

Adam is an avid follower of the latest hardware innovations, and he is never happier than when tinkering with complex network configurations, or exploring a new Linux distro. He was also previously a co-host on the ITPro Podcast, where he was often found ranting about his love of strange gadgets, his disdain for Windows Mobile, and everything in between.

You can find Adam tweeting about enterprise technology (or more often bad jokes) @AdamShepherUK.