Google kicks off further development on quantum computing as it launches a hardware initiative to develop and build superconducting electronics-based processors for its Quantum Artificial Intelligence team.

In addition the search giant hires researcher John Martinis and his team from UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). Martinis and his lab are superconducting electronics pioneers, being among the first to work on the technology back in 2008.

"With an integrated hardware group the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture," a Google Research blog reads.

Martinis and his team will be based at the Google Santa Barbara office.

"I bleed Microsoft-— have for 34 years and I always will," Steve Ballmer writes in the letter announcing his retirement from the Microsoft board, all of 6 months after the appointment of Satya Nadella as company CEO.

"Given my confidence and the multitude of new commitments I am taking on now, I think it would be impractical for me to continue to serve on the board, and it is best for me to move off," the former CEO continues. What commitments has Ballmer taken on, you might ask? These include teaching and civic engagements, but mainly he will be busy with his latest purchase, the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.

The National Basketball Association approved the $2 billion acquisition earlier this month, news announced in the shape of a boisterous on-stage address to the press and fans, Ballmer-style.

HP announces its fiscal Q3 2014 results, with revenues reaching $27.6 billion with 1% Y-o-Y growth-- virtually flat results, then, but still an improvement compared to 11 straight quarters of decline.

"Overall, I'm very pleased with the progress we've made," CEO Meg Whitman, says "When I look at the way the business is performing, the pipeline of innovation and the daily feedback that I receive from our customers and partners, my confidence in the turnaround grows stronger."

The company sees surprising growth in PCs, as the Personal Systems division reports 12% Y-o-Y revenue growth with 4% operating margin. Both commercial and consumer revenues are up (14% and 8%), while total units are up by 13% as desktop units grow by 9% and notebooks by 18%.

As part of research into creating brain-like computers IBM unveils what it claims is the first "neurosynaptic" computer chip, one packing 4096 cores simulating the operation of 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses.

Dubbed "TrueNorth", the chip carries 5.4 billion transistors, making it one of the largest CMOS chips ever built, yet consumes only 70mW when running in realtime. Altogether, IBM says the chip performs 46 billion synaptic operations per second, per watt.

While the numbers sound vast, one has to keep in mind the dazzling complexity of nature-- 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses mean a single TrueNorth chip has all the brain power of a cockroach. That aside, it still represents a breakthrough for IBM as the second generation chip built on "neuroscience-inspired scalable and efficient computer architecture."

The architecture is scalable, and IBM also has a 16-chip system simulating 16m neurons (the amount making a frog's nervous system, fact fans) and 4bn synapses.

Cisco results all but flat for fiscal Q4 2014, with revenues dipping by -0.5% Y-o-Y to $12.4 billion, while net income reaches $2.2bn with a -1% Y-o-Y decline.

The results still beat the more pessimistic expectations of Wall Street, whose analysts forecast revenues reaching $12.1bn. The company was also expecting such results, as fiscal Q3 2014 guidance predicted revenue losses of -1-3% Y-oY.

However the company's employees get some bad news in the shape of another round of layoffs, one reaching 6000 or 8% of the Cisco employee base.

"We are executing well in a tough environment and delivered our best non-GAAP earnings per share quarter in our history. I'm pleased with how we are transforming our company over the past several years and that journey continues," CEO John Chambers says. "We are focused on growth, innovation and talent, especially in the areas of security, data center, software, cloud and internet of everything."

Intel reveals further details on its 14nm "Broadwell" microarchitecture and manufacturing process, technologies the company claims will serve applications ranging from mobile devices to cloud infrastructure and the internet of things.

According to the company the 14nm process cuts power consumptions by 25% in comparison to the 22nm Haswell. It also doubles the improvement in performance-per-watt versus Haswell, with a 2nd generation Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator (FIVR) providing better efficiency at lower voltages.

"Intel's 14nm technology uses 2nd-generation Tri-gate transistors to deliver industry-leading performance, power, density and cost per transistor," Intel manufacturing group senior fellow Mark Bohr says. "Intel's investments and commitment to Moore's law is at the heart of what our teams have been able to accomplish with this new process."