After years of hard work, countless rumours and repeated failure, it seems likely AMD’s stellar marketshare growth in the US may finally force Dell to submit.

The latest rumours are strong, that Dell may do a deal to resell an AMD notebook as a prelude to a more extensive partnership including AMD Opteron servers. A deal could be done as early as next month say the rumours, though Dell executives are still denying there’s any chance of recapitulation.

However, the rebuttals fall short of definitive and Michael Dell is on record at this year’s CES as saying an AMD deal is “a distinct possibility”.

Then at last week’s Davos meeting in Switzerland, when asked by a Reuters journalist if the company would offer Opteron or Athlon-based machines, Michael Dell pointed out that the company doesn’t have an “exclusive relationship with Intel”, but that there was no “new product to announce today”.

Now a financial analyst, Doug Freedman of American Technology Research, is predicting an Dell will sign up to sell AMD processor systems and provides amore specific date. “We believe there will be an AMD/Dell deal announced very soon; more specifically, we believe it will come as early as March,” Freedman wrote in an update to his customers.

A deal at this point in time would be interesting as AMD has made significant marketshare gains on Intel thanks to a processor performance lead it has held for most of the past two years. This technology lead really paid off last year, but the company will be fighting to pull a rabbit out of a hat later this year as new Intel product looks set to leapfrog the junior player this year.

An Dell deal with AMD may be too little too late, though Michael Dell may see it as payback for Intel’s recent signing of Apple Computers which dropped the PowerPC processor and began offering systems based on the x86 architecture chips from Intel earlier this year.

Though a deal with Dell would be a major marketshare boost for AMD, the company has had a hard time signing the last major hold out vendor. Last year AMD accused Intel of anti-competitive behaviour forcing its customers, including Dell, to avoid AMD chips. The two chip-makers are currently in the discovery phase of an anti-trust court case likely to begin later this year.

AMD has also recently resolved a number of supply issues it had last year which would have prevented it from supplying sufficient processors to feed Dell’s potential volumes. With its latest Fab36 in Dresden and new contract manufacturing deals bolster its supply capabilities.