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Dell revealed in its quarterly earnings statement that it now intends to offer AMD servers alongside its traditional Intel-based machines.

AMD was quick to celebrate the new alliance and the ending of an old order: 'We welcome Dell, and Dell customers, to the world of AMD64,' said Marty Seyer, AMD senior VP of Commercial Business. 'Dell is a customer-focused company and we're pleased to see that they are listening to their customers and providing them the choice of innovative AMD products. We look forward to working closely with Dell in bringing the benefits of AMD leadership in performance-per-watt solutions to Dell customers.'

The first signs of a breach between Dell and Intel arose back in November 2005, when Dell rather coyly began selling AMD processors from deep within its site. (It offered a total of six Athlon 64 processors

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for sale ranging from the single core 2.2GHz Athlon 64 3500+ at $219 through to the dual core 2.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 4400+ at $542.)

As we reported at the time, Dell could not be unaware of the sales potential of buying AMD, with AMD having just overtaken Intel in retail sales in the US for the first time.

More ominous for Intel has been the vigour with which AMD has pursued anti-trust complaints against Intel around the world. Increasingly, AMD has subpoenaed companies in a bid to find documentary evidence of hidden alliances with Intel. Microsoft joined a list of some of the biggest names in the PC business including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and many others.

Dell's insistence on remaining an Intel-only supplier while the market increasingly embraced products from AMD looked increasingly unsupportable. AMD has successfully lead the charge towards 64-bit computing and multi-core computing, and its flagship Opteron chip has enjoyed strong sales for low-end servers. Only this week, it revealed - courtesy of the Turion 64 X - the first 64-bit dual core offering.

Intel, for its part, told us that its relationship with Dell was unchanged. A company spokesperson told us that Dell 'continues to show support for the bulk of Intel's range and that Intel intended to deliver on a strong roadmap going forward'.