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Having just beaten Israel to emerge as Intel’s largest design centre outside the US, India centre is now learnt to be working on designing a future Xeon processor code-named "Whitefield" (after a suburb in Bangalore) completely in India.

Whitefield is a low-power multicore Xeon processer that places four mobile Banias cores around a shared Level 2 cache. The chip will arrive sooner than we expected last week; our sources say 2006. This chimes with predictions made by Intel India's President Ketan Sampat, who said customers could expect a new Xeon out of India by 2005 or 2006 on a 65 nanometer process.

The Economic Times has a report. El Reg on the other hand covered this story in May - here and here.

The Hindu notes that three Indians have made it into Fortune magazine's "Asia's power 25" list.

According to the latest issue of the Fortune magazine, Premji has been ranked tenth while Ambani is 13th and Nilekani 23rd.

"Our picks are magnets to be watched" writes Fortune in its second annual list of the world's most powerful people in business. "India, too, is spawning powerful moguls. With a racing economy, a highly skilled technical workforce, and the ability to easily export goods and services to the rest of the English-speaking world, India is coming into its own," the magazine said.

Click here for the full report.

The proposed operating-system migration of the City of Munich's 14,000 desktops from Microsoft to Linux was placed in jeopardy Friday, when a Munich alderman petitioned the Bavarian city's mayor to examine the status of software patents in the European Community.

The issue was raised by Green Party Alderman Jens Muehlhaus, who warned that patent issues could grind some of the city's departments to a halt in the future. The issue involves a proposed directive on software patents that is being considered by various European governments, including Germany, France, and the U.K.

“The threat is this: a patent owner could send a cease-and-desist order against the City of Munich,” said Florian Mueller, a software entrepreneur and spokesman for the Green Party there. Mueller noted that the European patent situation is “a grey area” that should be clarified.

Techweb has this piece.

The Economic Times is carrying a story on Infosys' focus on building competent training centres in India, to get employees 'Industry-trained'.

Infosys Chairman and Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy said the company was forced to think on these lines in order to ensure that India doesn’t lose its competitive edge in the global IT industry.

Commenting on China’s challenge to India in the IT industry, he said that China had made tremendous work to bridge the gap with India.

‘‘If India continues to do nothing, the bridge could shorten to about three years. However, if India continues to retain and develop its lead, this could stretch to five, seven or even 10 years,’’ he added.

Click here for the full article.

Macromedia announced the availability of (another) update to Flash MX2004 in the form of a 66.6MB (!) download. The update is available here. The bug-fixes are catalogued in the release notes.

Skype, makers of free PC-to-PC VOIP software, have now introduced a new service named SkypeOut, which allows (for a charge), Net-to-phone capabilities as well.

Customers of SkypeOut, as the service is called, download free Skype software and then create an account of $12 (10 euros), $30 or $62 worth of voice minutes. The accounts are charged at rates depending on where the call originates and which region is being called.

"In a server-less environment, you can increase in size indefinitely without adding cost," Frost & Sullivan analyst Jon Arnold said. "That's a scary proposition if you're a phone company."

SkypeOut is also likely to attract more attention for Skype from U.S. regulators, which are now drafting Net phone rules due in about three months that are expected to provide a light touch but still demand that VoIP providers contribute to services such as Universal Service.

ZDNet is carrying this piece.

Just as Google was announcing plans to raise upwards of $3 billion through its initial public offering this fall, the two largest search engines in the United States felt the impact of an intrusive new virus that managed to cripple search engines for a decent part of the day.

The virus was an evolution of the MyDoom web worm that hit computers earlier this year. The new variation not only scans the hard drives of its victims for e-mail addresses, but also sends out queries to search engines in order to locate additional addresses to target. Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology for Keynote Systems Inc., told reporters that requests from the worm "have been overloading the search engines."

Both Google and Yahoo! issued statements explaining that while there had been a slow down in their respective services, both engines had managed to block the worm from their systems by Monday afternoon. "A small percentage of our users and networks that have the MyDoom virus have been affected for a longer period of time. At no point was the Google Web site significantly impaired, and service for all users and networks is expected to be restored shortly" said David Krane, a spokesperson for Google.

Search Engine Guide has this report.

The BBC (and every other self-respecting news source) has reported on the release of the title of the third Star Wars prequel - 'Revenge Of The Sith'.

The film, out in May 2005, links the prequels with the original trilogy by showing how Anakin Skywalker becomes the evil Darth Vader.

The film's title was announced at the Comic-Con International science fiction convention in San Diego on Saturday.

Click here for this story.

NASA is set to launch a spacecraft to Mercury in August with a probe meant to orbit the heavy-metal planet while it maps its surface and looks for frozen water in shady polar craters.

Messenger won't make the first Mercury fly-by until 2008 and will not begin its main mission until 2011, after flying some 4.9 billion miles, the scientists said at a briefing. The roundabout route is geared to saving the cost and weight of the extra fuel required for a quicker trip.

The last time the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sent a spacecraft to this planet nearest to the sun was in 1974 and 1975, when the Mariner 10 probe made three close passes, returning detailed data on less than half of Mercury's surface.

MSNBC has this article.

The Economic Times reckons that Chennai is fast becoming the favoured detination for IT majors.

However, analysts believe it was only a matter of time before Chennai outscore Maharashtra and even Karnataka over a longer term.

"Chennai is cheaper by a huge margin compared to Bangalore. Besides, here we get reliable and stable workforce, compared to Bangalore, where there is a huge floating population," said an official with a real-estate tracking firm.

Click here to read the entire article.