VIRGINIA ROMETTY IBM'S NEW CEO

Speculation has been running fairly consistent for awhile now that there would soon be a new CEO at IBM, as Sam Palmisano approached the company’s typical retirement age. Today the company’s board of directors named Virginia Rometty, senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy, as the new CEO. She’ll take over at the start of the new year. Palmisano will continue as chairman.

According to IBM’s official bio on her, she goes by the name “Ginni.” In her current job, she’s been responsible for revenue, profit, and client satisfaction globally and has been in charge of strategy, marketing and communications.
Before that she ran Big Blue’s global business services unit and helmed the tricky integration of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which was a key acquisition in 2002, as it became the lynchpin of IBM’s strategically important services business. You may remember that Hewlett-Packard tried and failed to acquire the PwC Consulting business during the Carly Fiorina era. At that time, HP proposed paying $17 billion and change, but negotiations fell through. IBM swooped in and took it out for less than $4 billion in 2002.

Rometty’s naming as CEO makes it an interesting moment in history. With Meg Whitman at the helm of HP, women now run the two biggest IT companies by revenue in the world.

GOOGLE BUYS OVER 1,000 IBM PATENTS TO HELP AGAINST ANDROID LAWSUITS

Google Inc. bought 1,023 patents from IBM as the Internet search and advertising company bolsters its strategy of defending against smartphone lawsuits. Google is building an arsenal of patents that the company has said is largely designed to counter a “hostile, organized campaign” by companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. against the Android operating system for mobile devices. Google had already acquired 1,030 patents from IBM in a transaction recorded in July, and will obtain more than 17,000 with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.

Jim Prosser, a spokesman for the Mountain View, California- based company, confirmed the transaction today without providing details or financial terms. Chris Andrews, a spokesman for Armonk, New York-based IBM, declined to comment.

GOOGLE HATES PATENT WARS, BUYS 1,000 NEW PATENTS FOR DEFENSE

Google’s general counsel Kent Walker apparently doesn’t see eye to eye with the rest of his company. “The tech industry has a significant problem,” Walker said earlier this week. “Software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation.” According to SEO by the Sea however, Google purchased 1,030 patents from IBM just two weeks before Walker made those comments. According to the report, the patents purchased cover a wide rage of IP, “from the fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips, to other areas of computer architecture including servers and routers as well.” Still more patents cover specific database functions, various aspects of object-oriented programming and even some business processes. The terms of Google’s acquisition have not been disclosed.

APPLE SURPASSES GOOGLE AS MOST VALUABLE BRAND IN THE WORLD

Apple has surpassed Google as world’s most valuable brand, according to advertising firm WPP’s “BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands” study. Apple’s brand value has ballooned 859% since 2006, and increased 84% to $153.3 billion this year. Tech companies dominate the rankings: AT&T, China Mobile, IBM, and Microsoft all have spots in the top-10 most valuable brands list, and McDonald’s is the only non-tech brand in the top-5. Google had reigned supreme for the past four years before being displaced by Apple, and Amazon surpassed Walmart to become the No. 1 retailer.

IBM TO SUPPORT USB 3.0 AND THUNDERBOLT IN IVY BRIDGE IN 2012

Beijing, the Chinese capital, is the site of Intel's currently ongoing developer conference, which is where Kirk Skaugen, VP of the company's Architecture Group, assured the world that the promise for native USB 3.0 support in Intel chipsets will be fulfilled. Not this year, mind you, but it'll be with us in 2012 as part of the Ivy Bridge CPU refresh. That matches AMD's plans to support USB 3.0 in Fusion APUs, and was augmented with a strong word of endorsement from Skaugen about the connector's future. He urged developers to embrace USB 3.0 on an equal footing with Intel's proprietary Thunderbolt interconnect, describing the two technologies as "complementary."

RUMOR: DELL PLANNING TO BUY AMD

Rumor has it that Dell has been looking to buy chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). AMD has been having its clock cleaned for some time now by rival IBM. Senior executives have been fleeing left and right in the last month, with CEO Dirk Meyer departing back in January and COO Robert Rivet also running away from the beleaguered chipmaker last week.

Right now, CFO Thomas Seifert is acting as interim CEO at AMD, but he has asked that the promotion be temporary until a new CEO can be found.

“There is no management team there,” said Patrick Wang, an analyst at Wedbush Securities in New York. He then said there is a “far-reaching possibility” that the company is up for sale, according to “chatter.”

The purchase by Dell would put them in charge of its own manifest destiny, controlling the silicon of both the processors and GPUs that make up its machines.

WATSON DEBUTS ON JEOPARDY, SKYNET TAKEOVER BEGINS

Today, tomorrow, and the 16th are the fateful days: IBM's Watson supercomputer will go head to head with Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in this silly, human-devised game we call Jeopardy. It promises to be some kickass TV, at the very least, and a historic event if Watson can prevail over his fleshy competition. The two matches, which are being spread over the three days, were pre-taped, so Ken, Brad, Alex and Watson already know the outcome, but they've done a pretty good job of keeping the secret so far. Hopefully they can keep mum until 7pm-ish this evening (check your local listings for a specific time).

IBM scientists have been working on Watson, which will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself.

IBM CLAIMS WORLDS FASTEST PROCESSOR

IBM has claimed they have created the world's fastest processor at 5.2GHz.  The z196 processor is a quad-core manufactured using their 45 nanometer technology.  The processor has 1.4 billion transistors and is capable of more than 50 billion instructions a second, all without any water cooling or fancy tricks.

Fujitsu's Venus processor claims to handle 128 billion instructions per second, so IBM may not be holding the crown for very long. [Engadget]