Intel has had to keep roaring in order to keep the spotlight from shifting to "hotter" competitor AMD. It may be succeeding, although the battle, as they say, "has just begun." AMD's recent purchase of graphics chipmaker ATI will soon give AMD a full suite of chips and chipsets to better compete with Intel's scale.

But, Intel is no sitting still. Its recent Core Duo and Core Duo 2 chips are matching and beating comparable AMD chips in many tests, a sign that Intel's engineering prowess has finally caught up to the scrappy competition -- something that took years to do for the world's largest chipmaker.

Along those strong lines comes a new server chip that retains the older (and perceptibly dated and outmoded) moniker "Xeon". I'm not sure why Intel kept the name Xeon in the name, but larger customers like IBM and HP probably know it well, and those are the main customers -- so that angle, at least, makes sense. The new Xeon "Tulsa" is made in Oklahoma apparently -- just kidding.

The "Tulsa" server processor is meant for intensive database servers and promises -- according to Intel engineers -- to rapidly speed up server-based processing, especially when databases are used. With almost every e-commerce server I can think of using a database structure in some form or fashion, this seems like a pretty decent market.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

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.