The old 'Dell to offer AMD-based systems' chestnut has been pulled from the roasting tray again following comments made by various senior Dell executives to the effect that the company is taking a very close look at AMD's Opteron chip.

So we have Dell COO Kevin Rollins telling a Merrill Lynch conference that the PC giant is looking at the new 64-bit CPU "very closely". And in a Fortune article on AMD's new baby, Rollins says: "We are looking very closely at AMD's products right now."

The same article notes a comment made by Michael Dell himself at the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year. "We're open to whatever our customers want," he said at the end of a discussion about Dell using AMD's chips.

Now there's no doubt AMD would very much like to have Dell on board, as would the company's many fans. Apart from IBM, AMD has no top-tier server vendor support for Opteron, and if it's to build credibility with business buyers, that's exactly what it needs. AMD may have a good reputation in the consumer PC space, it has relatively little standing in the business computing arena, particular in the server segment.

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