Dell is rumoured to be looking to acquire AMD.

The rumour started with financial news outlet Barron's, reporting this week that AMD's shares had spiked and were up five per cent because of the possibility of a Dell acquisition being on the cards.

A "far-fetched possibility"

Patrick Wang, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, admitted to Bloomberg that he was also aware of Wall Street "chatter" about the possibility of Dell looking to buy AMD.

However, Wang also added that such a deal was a "far-fetched possibility."

Recently disposed ex-CEO of AMD Dirk Meyer did admit late last year that the company was happy to listen to any serious proposals from potential buyers that was in the interest of the shareholders. Then he was promptly fired in January of this year.

Dell currently has $14.4bn in cash reserves. However, the fact that the company also does good business with Intel and doesn't like to tie itself exclusively to any particular chip manufacturer - added to the fact that AMD itself does goes business with a number of other PC vendors in addition to Dell – suggests that a mooted Dell acquisition is highly unlikely.

Still, stranger things have happened in the tech industry, so let's not completely rule out the possibility until we receive an official denial from one or other party.

TechRadar has contacted both Dell and AMD for further comment.

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... amd-928992

I'd bet AMD shareholders would love that.
It's the best time to sell as they have new architectures coming out. In a year or two Intel will have a massive lead again and AMD shares will be worth much less. (AMD have a very loong design cycle and won't be able to keep up with Intel.)
And ATi are unlikely to save them as they're currently lagging behing Nvidia.

In what sense? For price/performance I think ATi have been whipping Nvidia since the advent of the 4870.

TBH Dell buying AMD might be enough to put me off buying AMD chips.

Not a great fit for either company. It would make more sense for Apple but even then unless the architecture road map is adequate then I cant see them being interested. Chances are a Chinese company will buy.

Apple tend to be fairly agnostic in the ATi vs Nvidia thing - they use both. Plus they don't use any AMD CPUs so there's no real business case. I'd agree the buyer is likely to be Far Eastern, although i have a nagging suspicion there's not been much in the way of subcontinent inroads in big hardware yet and that may be due to change - do TATA have any sort of electronics involvement?

Jon

Not sure but a LOT less problematic that being bought by a chinese company.

They have some fairly heavy IT and telecoms involvement certainly so I wouldn't be surprised to see them trying a vertical integration.

Not sure it's very likely though tbh.

I can't conceive of any rationale that would justify Dell buying AMD. Assuming the rumour started because AMD is actually trying to arrange such a purchase (or it might be some kind of nudge to force it to), I would have thought Fujitsu to be a much more likely bidder.

Could somebody be starting silly rumours just to bid the price up a bit?

Most likely.

In that the last two generations of GPU from Nvidia have been poor, allowing AMD/ATi in. With the current generation that situation has reversed. Plus Nvidia have more experience now with the complex designs needed for future GPU's. AMD are still building lower performance parts and relying on multi GPU setups for high end performance.