"Alienware is part of Dell's gaming division but they are separate. Alienware has it's own technologies, design methodology and customer requirements/segmentations they built to and for a lot of cases they have platforms that we don't have [meaning AMD] and vice-versa.

We do have obviously a strategic partnership with them because there are technologies that we continue to look at and drive the industry together. For instance, we have R&D labs that both work on next-generation multi-core technologies (CPUs, GPUs, audios, physics, whatever), cooling technologies and things like that... There are lots of exotic things that we work on. Obviously they are proprietary and confidential. We don't necessary talk about until we launch in a product [...] But I think it's probably one the little hidden gems inside of Dell.

Alienware has access to Dell's supply chain. Bringing the purchasing power of Dell to Alienware only makes their products that much better. But they are still purely independent."