come to think of it dell computers still mostly only come with Intel CPUs. would explain why AMD failed so hard in sales. they've always had issue with R&D budget, had this not happened in the first place AMD quite possibly could have had more for R&D by now.
OT but I'll endeavour to add some quick facts and backround before this turns into a flamefest
Decreased R&D? Quite possible - Intel gave Dell about a billion dollars to remain Intel exclusive, but you'd need to factor in a few other things, such as
1. While Dell wasn't an AMD customer, Hewlett-Packard was and AMD couldn't keep them or their other OEMs supplied with chips (at least not the better binned ones) - for example
1998.....
2004....
2005
2. When Dell signed on to sell AMD procs in 2006 - initially Opteron servers and a couple of months later desktop, AMD basically diverted H-P's chips to Dell...
Dell then went into their famous nosedive and H-P became the number one supplier of computer systems. Oops!
3. AMD's cash supply and fortunes were directly related to the cash they borrowed to buy ATI.
Write downs of over half the amount AMD paid out and debt servicing directly led to selling off the cable TV business to Broadcom, the mobile IP business to Qualcomm (which is what is being discussed here), their foundry business to ATIC/Mubadala, and also led directly to AMD narrowing its R&D focus to a modular CPU architecture at the expense of jettisoning the
mobile and
smartphone processor development in 2008
Dunno about that. They might still suck in mobile segment, but without NVidia we wouldn't have CUDA, Programmable Shaders, upcoming GPU Virtualization or cheapest supercomputing platform ever.
Without Nvidia, we'd have a single discrete graphics maker. Some people might find this attractive, but I'm guessing that prices wouldn't remain at present levels. Some people it seems put fanboyism ahead of monetary consideration - an odd stance since the same people tend to level the same criticism at people that buy Nvidia products.