Speaking at the 14th Annual Citigroup Technology Conference, Dell noted that his company began using AMD processors in addition to supplies from Intel Corp., because it wanted to give customers a variety of choices and also because it wanted to guarantee for itself a steady supply of electronic components.

"It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to only have one of these choices," Dell said. "We think having two suppliers is absolutely in our best interest."

Dell (Round Rock, Texas) is the world's second-biggest supplier of personal computers. The company CEO disclosed that he expects AMD to introduce its quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, next week and, comparing it with Intel's Clovertown quad-core processor, said his company would like to offer customers a choice of either product.

"If you look at floating point instructions, Barcelona is about 30 percent faster than Clovertown. However, if you look at integer instructions, Clovertown is about 30 percent faster than Barcelona," Dell said.

"Depending on the type of application you are running or even your theory of computer science, you might have a preference for one type of server or another," he added.

Retail push

Dell's founder and top executive said the management is pushing hard globally to add retail partners as part of plans to improve its market share in the consumer sector, a segment he said Dell has had limited visibility previously due to its direct sale strategy.

He added that the company is also planning to increase its service offerings by adding IT service support, application installation and application management, a set of offerings that would turn Dell, in his words, into "the IT department for the customer."

Commenting on why Dell slipped behind Hewlett-Packard Co. in the ranking of the world's biggest PC vendors, the Dell executive noted that his company became less efficient at managing its resources even as its rivals improved.

"Competitors did get better and we squandered efficiencies in our own business," Dell said. "We are deep into injecting efficiencies back into our business but this takes time."