Once an enthusiastic supporter of Intel's x86 view of the world, Tin Box shifter Dell is now testing ARM chips.

Forrest Norrod, general manager for Dell’s server solutions group told Forbes that he had been testing ARM systems in his lab for the last 12 months. Although there do not seem to be any products actually planned yet, Norrod is promising that if that’s what our customers demand that’s what Dell will offer.

Norrod spoke with Forbes at an event in San Francisco where Dell introduced a portfolio of new blade, rack, and tower servers. Forbes somewhat cynically suggests that hinting that it might go the way of the ARM might cause its AMD and Intel suppliers to panic and give them better deals in the future.

However ARM-based processors in servers are fairly credible product options. Norrod said that if Dell wanted to incorporate ARM into our server lineup,  to any management  tool it just looks like a PowerEdge server.