Dell and Alienware have officially announced Dell’s acquisition of Alienware, a high-end custom PC manufacturer. While I’m not able to find the financial details of the deal, be assured it was a pricey acquisition. Other than the obvious questions about branding and competition (Dell's XPS line), there is also the question about CPUs (read: AMD). Dell has been a staunch Intel buyer, while AMD has favored AMD in its gaming PCs thus far. This clearly puts Dell as an AMD client now, and we can only speculate how this will play out. Will we see Alienware with the Intel logo on them, or will we see XPS systems powered by the Athlon64 FX60?

I'm not sure what to make of this deal. While I dislike seeing a huge company get bigger, I do know people who've been burned by Alienware's customer service. Again, we'll have to wait and see. I do find it interesting that this leave Apple as the only major OEM not to use AMD chips.

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