From InfoWorld: The bidding war for storage vendor 3Par continued to escalate Friday, with Hewlett-Packard submitting a new offer of $30 per share, or $2 billion. The offer topped a $27 per share bid made by Dell earlier in the day.

HP's board has approved the offer, but 3Par's has not yet done so, according to an HP statement. 3Par's board has accepted Dell's $27 per share bid, but the vendor would have to pay Dell a $72 million termination fee if it accepts a superior offer.

3Par is known for its "thin provisioning" technology, which allows storage resources to be provided on demand. It differs from traditional "fat provisioning," which allocates an excess amount of storage to an application in anticipation of future needs. Thin provisioning is much more efficient than the latter approach, which leads to underutilization of resources, advocates say.

Both HP and Dell see 3Par's products as a key asset for building cloud computing environments.

The competition for 3Par has been intense since Dell's initial offer of $1.15 billion on Aug. 16. Analysts have chalked this up to the fact that there are few alternative, comparable acquisition targets.

The bidding war will likely continue, according to Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman.

"It's not like we're dealing with a couple of companies that have a really tight budget. It's really hard to say what the ceiling for this thing's going to be," he said.

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From X-bit Labs: In line with the trends for ultra low-power servers, Advanced Micro Devices said that it would test its processors based on the Bobcat micro-architecture in server environments. Considering the fact that AMD already has very low power chips for servers, feasibility of using Bobcat micro-architecture is not clear.

"We are definitely in the process of examining this as a design point. It would be foolish not to," said Donald Newell, AMD's new server chief technology officer, in an interview with IDG News Service.

The interest towards low-power servers is growing nowadays. Both AMD and Intel have introduce server Opteron or Xeon chips with massively reduced power consumption in the recent years and AMD this year even managed to squeeze a quad-core AMD Opteron chip into 35W thermal envelope. There are companies experimenting with Intel Atom and Via Nano chips in server environments, but so far such machines have not gained popularity. ARM, the leading developer of low-power architectures for mobile devices, also says that some of its partners are exploring feasibility of using ARM-based microprocessors in servers.

But before Bobcat micro-architecture is implemented in a server chip, AMD has to analyze data like power-versus-performance benefits for specific tasks, including some that are not compute or time sensitive.

"There's only a few papers and there's a lot more data to collect. It really depends on a number of factors to whether or not that's a good design point," said Mr. Newell.

It is clear that Bobcat processors will provide lower idle power compared to AMD Opteron chips based on K10.5 or Bulldozer micro-architectures. But the big question is whether Bobcat chips will actually be able to work fast enough to provide decent performance.

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From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. early on Friday announced that third-quarter revenue will be below the company’s previous outlook. The company now expects third-quarter revenue to be $11.0 billion, plus or minus $200 million, compared to the previous expectation of between $11.2 and $12.0 billion. Revenue is being affected by weaker than expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets.

“It’s very unusual to release that negative press release at 10 a.m. Just the fact that it was done during market hours is bizarre," said Andrew Hooker, an equity trader at Wells Fargo Securities LLC, reports Bloomberg news-agency.

The company’s expectation for third-quarter gross margin is now 66%, plus or minus a point, lower than the previous expectation of 67%, plus or minus a couple of points. The impact of lower volume is being partially offset by slightly higher average selling prices stemming from solid enterprise demand. Inventories across the supply chain appear to be in-line with the company’s revised expectations.

Investors of Intel were furious about the company's inability to report about lower sales last week during the announcement of plans to buy McAfee. However, Intel said that last week it did not have all data in.

The warning by Intel is likely to trigger a serious of warnings by smaller technology companies, including direct rival Advanced Micro Devices, software giant Microsoft Corp., multimedia chip company Nvidia Corp. and many more.

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In the early days of the Intel Atom, despite being a low cost platform, many users found themselves wanting more than what the GMA950 integrated graphics are able to provide. Thankfully for us, NVIDIA stepped into the scene with the ION -- which opened up many new doors for many netbook, nettop and integrated system users alike. The NVIDIA ION platform not only allowed for better graphics performance, but also took some pressure off the CPU to make your overall system run smoother. Of course, with the introduction of the new Pineview core Intel Atom processors, users were again yearning for something better than the graphics performance of the Intel GMA 3150 -- and once again NVIDIA has stepped up to the plate with the NVIDIA ION 2. Whoops, did I just say NVIDIA ION 2? As far as I know, NVIDIA marketing would like the media to use only "Next-Generation ION" or "Next-Generation NVIDIA ION Graphics", and explicitly told us to refrain from mentioning NVIDIA ION 2 or the codename of the chip (Which is GT218, by the way) in our review for some marketing mumbo jumbo purposes. This is all fine and dandy and all, except what would we call the NVIDIA ION 3 when it is released? "Next-Next-Generation ION"? How about the ION 4? (Sorry guys, Powerade already stole that name.) While I would love to call the NVIDIA *** * "Next-Generation ION" as much as I can, at the end of the day it still seems downright silly to me. Since companies these days are so intrigued by particles and related terms such as 'Atom' and 'Ion', I'd like to take the liberty and make up my own name here instead. Guys, say hello to the NVIDIA Proton. Now that we have clarified that part, let's get onto the meat of our review. Today, we will be taking a look at another product from Jetway, a company renowned for their mITX products that has become ever so popular among system builders and enthusiasts. The Jetway NC98-525-LF mini-ITX motherboard features the newest Atom D525 dual core processor and NVIDIA Proton graphics to take it to a promising new level of performance. Let us take a look at just how much better the Jetway NC98-525-LF in conjunction with NVIDIA Proton graphics compares against its predecessors.

View: Jetway NC98-525-LF mITX Motherboard review

From InfoWorld: A new version of the malware that crippled Windows PCs last February sidesteps safeguards designed to block rootkits from hijacking machines running 64-bit editions of Windows, researchers said Thursday.

"A new era has officially dawned; the era of x64 rootkits," said Prevx researcher Marco Giuliani in a post to the company's blog yesterday.

The updated rootkit, which goes by names including Alureon, TDL, and Tidserv, is able to infect 64-bit Windows PCs. "TLD3 can be considered as the first x64-compatible kernel mode rootkit infection in the wild," Giuliani said.

Both Prevx and Symantec have found evidence that hackers are actively using the rootkit.

"The infection is spreading on the Web, by using both porn websites and exploit kits," said Giuliani, who added that U.K.-based Prevx had first spotted the new rootkit more than a week ago. Symantec's first sighting was Wednesday.

A previous version of the rootkit caused serious problems earlier this year after a Microsoft security update crashed 32-bit Windows machines.

Within hours of a Feb. 9, 2010, release of security update MS10-015, users reported that their computers wouldn't restart. Two days later, Microsoft halted automatic distribution of the update and launched an investigation.

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From PC World: Google's latest Gmail phone calling feature hit the ground running with over one million phone calls placed from Gmail in first 24 hours the feature was available, Google said Thursday via Twitter.The big question is how many will make Gmail calls in the following 24 hours after people have gotten over the novelty of placing calls via their e-mail inbox.

This isn't terribly surprising that Google is has seen such day-one success considering Gmail has over 175 million monthly users, and the new feature is basically a combination of two popular services Gmail Voice Chat and Google Voice.

The feature, which is currently only available to U.S. Gmail users, allows users to place free "local" (within the United States and Canada) phone calls, as well as cheap international calls. Google says it's subsidizing the "local" calls with the international calls' rates, though these rates are still quite low. You can call a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Argentina, China, and Japan, for as low as two cents per minute.

Google says that the local calls are free for now, and will be through at least the end of this year. However, things may change as the service catches on (though it looks like it already is).

The feature is not yet available to all U.S. Gmail users. It's quite simple to use, however--at the top of your chat bar there is a "call phone" option. Simply click on it and a number pad will appear, on which you can dial your desired number and place a phone call. Naturally, a microphone is necessary in order for you to be able to communicate with the person on the other end of the line.

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From CNET News.com: Stop us if you've heard this before: Dell says 3Par has agreed to a buyout proposal.

On Friday morning, Dell announced that storage company 3Par has accepted Dell's third acquisition offer, this one at $27 per share, which puts the total value of the cash offer at about $1.8 billion.

This bid matches the latest counteroffer from Hewlett-Packard, which came Thursday afternoon. It also marks a 50 percent increase from Dell's initial offer.

As with Dell's previous offers, this one has been accepted by 3Par, Dell said. The two companies' agreements have been made with provisions that allow Dell to match competing bids.

On Thursday, HP offered $27 per share for 3Par in response to Dell's second proposal, at $24.30.

The bidding war got under way after Dell's initial offer earlier this month to buy 3Par for $18 per share, or about $1.15 billion total. A week later, HP countered with a bid of $24 per share.

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