Gadget and Gizmo

Lawyers for IBM are examining Sun Microsystems' contracts and other documents in a due diligence process that could precede an acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing unnamed sources.

Such work is common before a merger and suggests that acquisition talks between Sun and IBM, which were reported earlier this week but have not been confirmed by the companies, are still under way. Examining the documents could take a number of days, the Journal said.

[ Special report: IBM in talks to Buy Sun | If the merger goes through, watch out, Oracle and SAP | The deal could be good for Java, according to Google. ]

The work being done includes an examination of Sun's software license terms to see if any of them conflict with IBM's business practices, the newspaper reported. Sun offers most of its software, including its Solaris OS, MySQL database, and Java programming language, under a variety of open source licenses.

News of the supposed merger talks was broken by the Journal overnight on Tuesday, though Sun and IBM have not confirmed nor denied any discussions. IBM would pay between .5 billion and billion to buy the company, the Journal said Friday.

Observers have been puzzling over whether IBM is interested in Sun for its hardware or its software assets. IBM would gain some of Sun's large corporate customers and widen its lead in the enterprise server market, where it was just ahead of Hewlett-Packard last year, according to IDC.

There would also be significant overlap between the companies' product lines, however. Both have a Unix server OS, a RISC chip architecture, at least one enterprise database and a whole line of middleware. Any deal would create uncertainty for customers as to which products IBM would continue to develop and support.

Sun has been struggling to grow its business, particularly lately with the recession. Some of its biggest customers were Wall Street banks that either no longer exist or are in dire straits themselves.

Despite the uncertainty it would create, an acquisition by IBM might be a better outcome for Sun's customers than some of the alternatives, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group.

"The economic climate plays against Sun's recovery strategy. I think they have probably made as many cuts as they can without really changing what they do and having to drop something big," he said.

If the reports are accurate and Sun has decided to sell, the decision was probably driven by outside investors, notably Southeastern Asset Management, which increased its stake in Sun to more than 20 percent last year and has been pushing hard for a bigger return on its investment.

"I think those guys are driving the bus at Sun," Olds said. "This isn't a strategic thing or a Jonathan Schwartz thing; it's purely business."

Talk of an acquisition has pushed Sun's share price higher. It closed at .63 on Friday, up from .97 before the discussions were reported. IBM's share price initially slipped on the reports but recovered slightly on Friday, closing at .66.

Adding more processing cores has emerged as the primary way of boosting performance of server and PC chips, but the benefits will be greatly diminished if the industry can't overcome certain hardware and programming challenges, participants at the Multicore Expo in Santa Clara, California, said this week.

Most software today is still written for single-core chips and will need to be rewritten or updated to take advantage of the increasing number of cores that Intel, Sun Microsystems and other chip makers are adding to their products, said Linley Gwennap, president and principal analyst at The Linley Group.

[ Related: Intel wants developers to think parallel | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

Off-the-shelf applications will often run faster on CPUs with up to four processor cores, but beyond that performance levels off and may even deteriorate as more cores are added, he said. A recent report from Gartner also highlighted the problem.

Chip makers and system builders have begun efforts to educate developers and provide them with better tools for multicore programming. A year ago, Intel and Microsoft said they would invest million to open two research centers at U.S. universities devoted to tackling the problem. The lack of multicore programming tools for mainstream developers is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces today, Gwennap said.

Writing applications in a way that lets different parts of a computing task, such as solving a math problem or rendering an image, be divided up and executed simultaneously across multiple cores is not new. But this model, often called parallel computing, has been limited so far mainly to specialized, high-performance computing environments.

But in recent years, Intel and AMD have been adding cores as a more power-efficient way to boost chip performance, a marked change from their traditional practice of increasing clock speed. Intel is building eight cores into its upcoming Nehalem-EX chips, and AMD is designing 12-core chips for servers. They are also adding multi-threading capabilities, which allow each of the cores to work on multiple lines of code at the same time.

That means mainstream applications have to be written in a different way to take advantage of the additional cores available. The work is hard to do and creates the potential for new types for software bugs. One of the most common is "race conditions," where the output of a calculation depends on the various elements of a task being completed in a certain order. If they are not, errors can result.

A few parallel programming tools are available, such as Intel's Parallel Studio for C and C++. Other vendors in the space are Codeplay, Polycore Software and Clik Arts. There is also a new C-based parallel programming model called OpenCL, being developed by The Khronos Group and backed by Apple, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others.

But many of the tools available are still works in progress, participants at the Multicore Expo said. Software compilers need to be able to identify code that can be parallelized, and then do the job of parallelizing it without manual intervention from programmers, said Shay Gal-on, director of software engineering at EEMBC, a nonprofit organization that develops benchmarks for embedded chips.

Despite the lack of tools, some software vendors have found it relatively easy to create parallel code for simple computing jobs, like image and video processing, Gwennapp said. Adobe has rewritten Photoshop in a way that can assign duties like magnification and image filtering to specific x86 cores, improving performance by three to four times, he said.

"If you are doing video or graphics, you can take different sets of pixels and assign them to different CPUs. You can get a lot of parallelism that way," he said. But for more complex tasks, it is difficult to find a single approach for identifying a sequence of computations that can be parallelized and then dividing them up.

While the programming side may present the biggest challenge, there are also hardware changes that need to be made, to overcome issues such as memory latency and slow bus speeds. "As you add more and more CPUs on the chip, you need the memory bandwidth to back it up," Gwennap said.

Sharing a single memory cache or data bus among multiple cores can create a bottleneck, meaning the extra cores will be largely wasted. "By the time you get to six or eight CPUs, they spend all their time talking to each other and not moving forward to getting any work done," he said.

The onus may ultimately lie with developers to bridge the gap between hardware and software to write better parallel programs. Many coders are not up to speed on the latest developments in hardware design, Gal-on said. They should open up data sheets and study chip architectures to understand how their code can perform better, he said.

IBM is in talks to buy Sun, according to The Wall Street Journal, leading analysts and industry observers to weigh in on the pros and cons. Steve Ballmer gave it a thumbs up because anything that distracts IBM from the "business" part of its name is fine by him. Speaking of Ballmer, IE8 came out this week. Apple also gave the world a look-see at its forthcoming iPhone 3.0 software.

1.Report: IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems, Ballmer: IBM-Sun deal could help Microsoft and If IBM and Sun merge, watch out Oracle and SAP: IBM wants to buy Sun Microsystems, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the two are in talks aimed at that goal. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes the idea, too, saying that his company would take competitive advantage while IBM was occupied with how to incorporate Sun into a merged entity. Such a deal could also alter how Oracle and SAP use Java, analysts said.

[ Special report: IBM looking to buy Sun . ]

2.Microsoft releases IE8, stresses security, Researcher hacks just launched IE8 and Browser showdown: IE8 vs. Firefox: Internet Explorer 8 came out this week, with Microsoft trumpeting it as more secure against malware than Firefox or Chrome. Just before the official launch a German researcher hacked IE8 as part of a contest. Meanwhile, PC World tested IE8 against the latest version of Firefox to see which browser is speedier. We don't want to ruin the conclusion, so if you want to see the result of that test, click the link.

3.Apple unveils the iPhone 3.0 OS : Apple showed off its upcoming iPhone 3.0 software at an event at corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California. Developers expressed cautious optimism about the new OS and it also looks like some of the software features will please business users .

[ Test Center: A guided tour of iPhone 3.0 ]

4. Researchers make wormy Twitter attack: Secure Science researchers posted a new Twitter attack that could spread like a worm via the microblogging site. "You can couple an attack with our code and it would just tear the crap out of Twitter," said Lance James, chief scientist at Secure Science. Twitter users, consider yourselves warned.

5. Search on for Conficker's first victim: University of Michigan researchers, with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, are on a hunt to determine where the Conficker worm came from. They are trying to determine "patient zero," or the first computer that was infected by the nasty worm.

6. Palm sales plummet as Pre waits in the wings: Palm joined the club of companies that had a rough quarter, with its smartphone revenue plunging 72 percent, with smartphone sales down 42 percent. The rest of the dismal news awaits you at the link if you care to read on. For those who are full up on woeful financial news, read on for a breath of fresher air …

7. Wall Street Beat: M&A, Oracle stress the positive: Investors were in a better mood for much of the week (although by Friday they seemed to have returned to being panicky and uncertain). But several consecutive days of more upbeat market reactions and a trickle of related positive news from IT vendors did us all a lot of good, because at this point, we will take all of the relatively optimistic economic news we can get, however short-lived it winds up being.

8. TomTom sues Microsoft for patent infringement: We can just hear TomTom saying to Microsoft, "Ha! Ha! Take that!" The GPS device maker sued Microsoft for patent infringement related to four patents in Microsoft Streets and Trips mapping software. Microsoft, you might recall, filed a lawsuit against TomTom last month, accusing the company of infringing eight patents, one of which involves the Linux OS that TomTom uses.

9. Bracing for NCAA tournament traffic: Well, you didn't really think that this week's Top 10 would fail to include a nod to "March Madness," the annual playoff rite of early spring for college basketball fanatics, did you?

10. Flying car takes to the skies and roads: This entry falls under the "too cool to not include" category. Terrafugia showed off its flying car this week. Eat your heart out, George Jetson.