The Digitimes Taiwanese wire said Samsung is ready to follow Korean giant Trigem and use Athlon XP chips in its desktop PCs.
The reason, the story said, is the continuing shortage of Pentium 4 processors, but Trigem sales of XP have also caused Samsung to look at Athlon processors again.
Trigem and Samsung regularly beat each up in the domestic Korean market.
South Korea has been hit particularly hard by shortages of Pentium 4s, Digitimes claims, but adds that the price of the processors is also a consideration.
This is probably Samsung's rather polite way of saying: "Look Intel, we've been mates for years. Give us more supplies of Pentium 4 chips or we're bogging off to your smaller rival."
Dell has been known to invite AMD executives to sign its visitors' book every now and again and to ostentatiously allow Intel suits to view it every now and again.
Samsung and Intel have a number of strategic alliances so it's probably too early to say it's a goer yet. But Digitimes claims that the deal may happen early next year.
So Intel appears to be on a yellow card, if the reports are correct.
News source: The Inquirer - Samsung falling to AMD?
