Motorola puts Bing on Android handsets in China

In today's podcast: Motorola puts Bing on Android handsets in China; Chinese government likely source of US cyberattacks; and Intel shows off six-core desktop chip.

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Motorola will start loading Microsoft's search and map services onto its Android smartphones in China, bringing more non-Google services to the phones amid a row between Google and China. It is the second time since Google said it would stop censoring its search results in China that Motorola has turned to a Google search rival for its Android phones there. Motorola revealed a search deal with Baidu.com, Google's main rival in China, soon after Google announced its China plans in January.

The Chinese government is likely behind recent cyberattacks on U.S. government Web sites and on U.S. companies in an apparent effort to quash criticism of the government there, an expert on U.S. and Chinese relations said Wednesday. There's no conclusive proof that recent attacks on Google and dozens of other U.S. companies are directed by the Chinese government, but logic would point to official Chinese involvement, said Larry Wortzel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer. Google complained in January that it and several other U.S. companies were victims of recent cyberattacks coming from inside China. It is "not clear" who ordered the attacks, but it appears the Chinese government was involved, said Wortzel, who has served in the U.S. embassy in China.

Intel on Wednesday showed its first six-core processor for desktops, the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, which will go into workstations and enthusiast PCs targeted at gamers. The company said that the new chip will be faster and more power-efficient compared to its past gaming processors. Based on a new architecture, the processor includes more cores and will be capable of running 12 threads simultaneously for faster processing, the company said in a statement. Intel previously sold primarily quad-core chips for gaming PCs. An Intel spokesman said the chip will run at 3.33GHz, but declined to comment on when the chip will reach systems

CA said Wednesday it has signed a deal to buy IT performance monitoring vendor Nimsoft for US$350 million. The acquisition, which is scheduled to close this month, will strengthen CA's hand in IT management software for what it calls "emerging enterprises," or companies with annual revenues between $300 million and $2 billion, and for managed service providers. CA's move into the midmarket represents a change from its core business of serving large enterprises. Nimsoft also has an active presence in cloud computing, with offerings for Rackspace and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, among others.

...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.