AMD has announced its second-generation "Trinity" Accelerated Processing Units. The A-Series APUs are aimed at laptops, PCs, and embedded hardware. AMD's latest processors will come in dual- and quad-core variations and go toe-to-toe with Intel's third-generation Ivy Bridge Core chips.

Google will begin in the next few days to incorporate the "knowledge graph" it has been building for two years into its search results . The new search format will deliver context-sensitive information about the people and things users search for to the right of the conventional list of links to Web pages, said Johanna Wright, Google's director of product management.

A Microsoft in-store program that scrubs "bloatware" from Windows PCs will also be offered when Windows 8 machines reach the market later this year, a company representative said Wednesday. The service, which is offered only in Microsoft's small chain of retail stores -- it now has 21 operating or in the works -- is dubbed "Signature Upgrade," and it costs $99.

SAP seems to be betting its future on its HANA in-memory database, spotlighting the technology once again at the Sapphire conference in Orlando Wednesday, announcing a slew of new applications, partnerships and functional enhancements for the system.

There's a new push in the Senate to set aside as many as 55,000 green cards to science, technology, engineering and math graduates -- so-called STEM workers. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced a bill Tuesday to make green cards, or permanent residency, available to students who earn an advance degree, master's or Ph.D. from a research university, meaning a university that has received a federal funding for research.

Unified communications (UC) technology has garnered a fair amount of attention, much of it due to vendors touting their UC offerings as the answer to problems workers have keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners and customers in a highly frenetic, increasingly mobile business world. While the technology is delivering benefits to the relatively few organizations that have adopted it, experts say UC is still evolving and vendors need to do more to integrate their various products.

Google on Tuesday released Chrome 19, patched 20 vulnerabilities in the browser, and doled out $16,500 in bug bounties and rewards to independent researchers. Chrome 19's most obvious change is the new support for tab synchronization. Like the already available bookmark, password, app and extension sync, open tabs will now be kept in step on all copies of Chrome, on multiple platforms, including Android, that are linked to the same Google account.

Mozilla Marketplace, which is Mozilla's entrant in the online application store arena, is set to move to a public beta stage in a few weeks, a company official said on Tuesday.

For the third year in a row, mobile open source software projects have more than doubled in number, with the current count at around 18,000, up from around 8,000 in 2010.

After more than a year of active testing and debate over LightSquared's plan for a nationwide, wholesale 4G network, the now bankrupt company may end up as no more than a cautionary tale for mobile investors. Industry observers say there are three things that might bring some value to LightSquared's main asset, a chunk of disputed radio spectrum: The company could swap the spectrum for another block, sell it to another carrier, or win a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. But all three are unlikely, they said.

After a brief dip in late 2011, the Apple iPad has firmly reasserted its position as the dominant player in the tablet market. According to the latest figures released today from market intelligence firm iSuppli, the iPad is projected to account for 61 percent of all tablets sold this year, up from 55.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 7, is targeted for release in the second half of 2013, Red Hat said on Tuesday, as it also celebrated the 10th anniversary of its enterprise OS. Red Hat aims to release a major new version of its OS every three years and updates about every six months, according to Jim Totten, vice president and general manager at Red Hat's Platform business unit.

More than half of global PC users admit that they pirate software at least occasionally, contributing to a black-market economy estimated at $63.4 billion in 2011, up from $58.8 billion the previous year, according to a new survey from the Business Software Alliance.