“Michael Dell kicked off the LinuxWorld expo keynote with a
ringing endorsement of Linux. For an hour we were treated to
homilies to open source software, stories of how Dell itself relied
on Linux, and even a clarion call against restrictive intellectual
property laws – which predictably brought the house down.”
“In fact, he’d brought to bear all the zeal of… er… someone
who’s just noticed they’re selling rather a lot of Linux boxes
(racks might be more accurate) and wants to sell some more.”
“So afterwards, and noting that he’d also predicted a long
life for the “x86 architecture”, we asked him if his enthusiasm for
both Linux and x86 extended to AMD’s x86-64 architecture – which
had just been blessed with its first OS support from SuSE. His
answer is worth reproducing verbatim.“
“We will be selling x86 64-bit servers. In fact we’re
demonstrating them today – they’re Itanium based,” he said. “Will
we sell products based on the AMD 64-bit? That’s to be determined.
We don’t have any parts today.”