Hardnosed Dell mega-shareholder Carl Icahn gives up the fight against Michael Dell's ambitions of buying the company sharing his name back, and admits war against Dell and the board "would be almost impossible to win."

"The Dell board, like so many boards in this country, reminds me of Clark Gable's last words in "Gone with the Wind,"" Icahn says in a letter to fellow shareholders. "They simply "don't give a damn.""

Dell gives no comment on the story as yet.

In the letter Icahn blames his throwing the towel on procedural issues, such as the August refusal from the Delaware Chancery Court to fast-track a lawsuit against the company. Icahn was hoping the courts (via the upholding of appraisal rights under Delaware law) would force Dell would hold its annual meeting at the same time it was to vote on the buyout deal, giving him a chance to replace the current board with a new set of directors.

In a spot of breaking late-night surprise news Microsoft buys the Nokia Devices & Services division, together with licenses for Nokia patents and mapping services. The price? A cool €5.44 billion.

The acquisition covers both smartphones and feature phone lines (chiefly the Lumia and Asha series), and sees the transfer of 32000 Nokia employees to Microsoft from design, operations, sales, marketing and support teams.

Nokia retains its myriad patents, but grants Microsoft a 10-year non-exclusive license.

"It's a bold step into the future-- a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says. "Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft's share and profits in phones, and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services."

IBM shows off the latest generation of Power processors at the 2013 Hot Chips conference with the Power8 chip, a 12-core processor designed for cloud-based data centre applications. 

Seen in prototype form, the Power8 measures 650 square millimetres (making it slightly bigger than the Power7+) and is built using the 22nm process with coper and silicon-on-insulator technologies. 

Data transfer rates within the chip clock at 230GB per second, with 512KB of cache per core, 96MB on-chip cache and 128MB off-chip L4 cache. 

The 12 cores feature a total of 16 execution cores, with 2 load store units (LSUs), ondition register unit (CRU), branch register unit (BRU) and 2 instruction fetch units (IFUs). It also has 2 fixed-point units (FXUs), 2 vector math units (VMXs), decimal floating unit (DFU) and a cryptographic unit.  Read more...

Infamously bullish Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announces he is to retire within 12 months-- leaving the once technology leader with no clear successor, at least so far.

“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Ballmer says. “We have embarked on a new strategy with a new organization and we have an amazing Senior Leadership Team. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.”

The news comes around 6 weeks after the "far-reaching realignment" of the company's management, part of an effort to create a "One Microsoft" out of a conglomerate with a payroll of over 90000 employees...

Microsoft already has a special committee directing the hunt for a replacement, with the likes of Bill Gates and independent board director John W. Thompson joining forces with executive recruiting firm Struggles International.