Why market share is so important for AMD
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As it turned out, Dell never intended to announce this at all. Evidently, in the calm after the Yahoo/Microsoft storm, a reporter noticed that AMD had dropped off the choice list for Dell’s on-line ordering site. The result was that Dell chose to announce this move to make sure that the message stayed in control and avoid interpretations that Dell is abandoning AMD altogether, which isn’t accurate. You can view this announcement as a favor to AMD, providing damage control.
Intel will leave them in the dust...
So the stock price dip AMD took on the Dell announcement was the result of AMD’s decision to delay rollout of the Phenoms to correct their production problems and fix the errata in the L3, Dell had a timeline for CPU replacement/upgrade cycle that was disrupted by AMD’s decisions, and AMD paid the price.
There was a lot of money to be made trading AMD on these events.