Ruiz steps down as GlobalFoundries chairman

In today's podcast: Ruiz steps down as GlobalFoundries chairman; Intel chipset causes problems for iPhone; and PC makers look to rural China for growth.

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Former Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz stepped down as chairman of AMD manufacturing spinoff GlobalFoundries on Monday, a week after reports emerged of his alleged involvement in an insider-trading scandal. Ruiz allegedly shared confidential information about AMD with a Wall Street executive in a scheme that netted millions of U.S. dollars in illicit profits, according to a news report in The Wall Street Journal. He allegedly shared confidential information about AMD's reorganization in 2008 with trader Danielle Chiesi of hedge fund New Castle Funds, who then allegedly made trades based on the information. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 16 charged six individuals, including Chiesi and other Wall Street and technology company executives, with involvement in insider trading. Ruiz wasn't named in that original suit.

Some Windows 7 users are complaining on an Apple discussion forum that they can't synch their iPhones to their new PCs. The affected users -- there are 80 pages of people discussing the issue on the forum -- have discovered that in addition to running Windows 7, they are all using computers with the Intel P55 Express Chipset. Intel is investigating the issue and believes it is a BIOS or system configuration issue, but the company is still investigating, an Intel spokesman said. On Sunday, an Apple employee posted a note on the forum asking people with Windows 7 PCs that have the Intel P55 chipset to e-mail the company with specific details about their computer, iPhone model and the behavior they're seeing. The note indicates that Apple is also investigating the problem.

PC makers looking to boost sales in recent years have increasingly zoned in on rural China, a vast and largely untapped source of new PC users. Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard are the major PC makers that have made the most progress in rural China, a term often used to describe everything from mountaintop villages to cities of a few hundred thousand people. But other Chinese and foreign PC makers are also building their distribution networks in those regions in a bid to boost sales. The HP and Lenovo cases suggest that catered marketing tactics and a major investment in expanding a company's retail outlets are required for a rural sales push to succeed.

The Unity fiber-optic cable, a new trans-Pacific undersea cable partly backed by Google, has landed in Japan, marking an important step toward the launch of service. The US$300 million cable runs between Los Angeles and Chikura on the east coast of Japan and will be capable of transferring data at 4.8 terabits per second. It is scheduled to go into service sometime in the first three months of next year. The landing in Japan marks the penultimate step in cable laying. For the past two months two ships have been laying out the cable from a midpoint in the Pacific to each of the two landing points. The cable was joined in the middle of the Pacific on Oct. 30 and a single splice remains, off the Japanese coast, before testing can begin. The final splice is scheduled for sometime in the next two weeks.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.