Arm announces new chip design

In today's podcast: Arm announces new chip design; Google adds Instant Search capability; and Russian cybercriminal gets fine, probation.

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Arm Holdings has taken the wraps off its next major chip design, the Cortex-A15 MPCore, promising a five-fold increase in performance that the company hopes will take it beyond smartphones and into new types of equipment such as high-performance routers and servers. The A15 is still a long way from shipping in products. In fact, even its predecessor, the Cortex-A9, isn't expected to appear until the end of this year. Smartphones and other devices using the A15 will go on sale toward the end of 2012.

Pursuing speed, Google now refreshes search results while people type queries, which could usher in major changes for end users, advertisers and publishers. Announced on Wednesday, Google Instant presents and adjusts search results and their accompanying ads on the fly as users enter search terms in the search engine's box. The intention is to compress the loop of entering queries, scanning the search results, refining the query and checking the new results.

The mastermind behind one of the biggest hacking paydays in history has been sentenced to four years' probation and an US$8.9 million fine, according to published reports. Victor Pleshchuk, 28, was sentenced to four years' probation on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News. He is considered the leader of a group of criminals who organized a 2008 precision strike on RBS WorldPay, the payment processing division of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

U.S. President Barack Obama has called on Congress to approve a permanent research and development tax credit for U.S. companies as part of a multibillion-dollar package intended to jump-start the nation's economy. Obama, in a speech in Cleveland Wednesday, asked Congress to make permanent an R&D tax credit that has lapsed 13 times since 1981. The tax credit and other proposals will help U.S. companies create jobs, Obama said.

...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.