Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) is tired as hell, and isn't going to take it any more. Well, something like that. After having been battered in the consumer and retail PC market for well over a few years now, the commodity company has unleashed a whole slew of corporate server products and services aimed at taking on the services consulting leader, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and the largest computer company in the world that has set its sights on IBM as well, Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ).

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) indicated on Tuesday that it wold continue outsourcing what it could in relation to new product launches. As the company continues to try and save another billion in costs, Dell's CFO told an audience that "one new computer or server at a time" would be thrown to a manufacturing partner for production.

What used to be Dell's bread-and-butter -- internal, made-to-order product manufacturing -- is slowly falling by the wayside.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) has turned on the heat within the computer server market, taking first place in server growth in the latest quarter according to Gartner. Dell's server sales climbed 15% during the April-Jun quarter, outpacing an 11.5% gain at IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and a 2.9% increase at Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ). How did Dell run so much farther ahead of HP and IBM last quarter?

Although an economic pinch in the U.S. is affecting about every industry, computer server shipments worldwide rose 12% during the latest quarter, reaching 2.34 million units and $13.8 billion in sales. Although IBM still held onto the top spot with 31.2% market share, HP saw a small drop to 27.6% from 28.4% market share while Dell upped its market share a single percentage point to 13%. HP still delivered more server units than Dell for the quarter, however.

Does this point to a long-term trend in Dell's server sales success? Hardly. But, the Texas company has concentrated hard in the last few quarters in consumer retail exposure and svelte laptop PC designs as well as server systems -- and both efforts are making an impact. Dell's road to gaining the foothold it once held is easily underway, but it will continue needing more overseas growth as the U.S. market withers until sometime in 2009.

All that pressure from the Dell shareholder community and screaming analysts must have finally wore down the folks at Dell. For the first time in its history, Dell won't be using Intel CPU chips in some upcoming multi-processor servers by year's end -- but instead will make the switch to rival AMD and its blazing-hot Opteron server chip. Does this signal anything significant for any of these companies -- Dell, Intel or AMD? Sure it does, and more than just symbolically.

This opens the door for Dell -- the world's largest PC manufacturer (for today, as HP is back with a vengeance) to start using some AMD chips in its systems that outperform chips from Intel. Intel, of course, is not sitting on the sideline waiting for AMD to take more market share in the chip universe, as it has an aggressive product roadmap ahead, something we have not seen in literally years.

With Dell under pressure to continue the rabid chase of growth (which is slowing after years of double-digit percentages), it must find the best and highest-performing products for some of the server products in its portfolio -- and the answer lies with the AMD Opteron in some cases. AMD has been giving Intel a run for the money lately, counter-punching its much-bigger chip rival at every turn it seems. With the king-of-all-chips-Intel company -- Dell -- finally embracing AMD for a change, things are set to be interesting for the next 18 months and beyond in the server (and PC) world.

Update: 11:45AM EDT -- This blog entry explains a little more detail on the types of servers that AMD will power in the Dell lineup. Although the point of this blog post is that the AMD relationship will be quite small, the door has been opened -- which is the most important thing of all.