Shares of Dell and AMD scrambled higher Friday with investors patting Dell on the back for a solid quarter and others buying into speculation that AMD will swallow large gobs of Intel's server processor market share in the months to come.

Dell's share price soared right past its previous 52-week high of $37.80 to $40.44. Investors enjoyed an 8.5 per cent gain on the day with 75m shares trading hands. The significant jump comes after Dell yesterday posted (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/12/dell_q3_05/) an 18 percent surge in revenue during its third quarter to $12.5bn.

Dell's shares have hovered between $32 and $36 for much of the last year, despite consistent revenue gains in previous quarters. For some reason, management's optimism of continued growth caught investor's attention this quarter.

AMD experienced a similar gain on the day, as its share price shot up more than 13 per cent to $21.01. AMD's shares started out the week at $17, but rose steadily due to favorable analyst reports.

The most influential report appeared to come from Merrill Lynch, which declared: "We don't think there's any workable strategy that Intel can use to counter AMD's share gain in the server processor market." The analyst firm set a price target of $22 per share for AMD, and investors have quickly pushed the stock close to that level.

AMD has also benefited somewhat from renewed speculation that Dell will pick up its Opteron processor for servers, workstations and gaming PCs. Such speculation, however, has been hovering over AMD since the dawn of time. ®

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