A year later, it isn’t clear whether the software giant’s shift will do much to improve its lagging position in mobile devices — or whether it is quite as ominous for Intel as it originally appeared.

On Monday night, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is set to return to the stage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he laid out the company’s plans for the new software, known as Windows 8. He isn’t expected to demonstrate any new features or give details about its progress.

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The Internet giant said Thursday it has lined up LG Electronics Inc. to join its roster of TV makers supporting Google TV. It also provided additional details about plans for the first products from Samsung Electronics Co. and Vizio Inc., which had previously said they would adopt the Google technology.

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U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark on Friday canceled a Feb. 14 trial in the high-profile case filed by New York’s attorney general, who charged Intel with monopolistic tactics in the market for microprocessor chips.

The order followed a letter to the judge from Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who proposed dropping the federal case in view of recent developments that reduced the amount of damages that New York could seek. Mr. Schneiderman said his office would instead pursue damages in New York state court to address “Intel’s egregious and illegal conduct.”

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That would be the unit that sells graphics chips to dedicated PC gamers and others that pay top dollar for blazing speed. Its latest offering is definitely styled as a silicon Ferrari, not a Honda Civic.

“A single one of these is the fastest thing on the planet,” says Devon Nekechuk, a product manager at the AMD operations in Canada, acquired as part of the 2006 acquisition of ATI Technologies.

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The vast majority of servers — including those from H-P — use the chips sold by Intel and AMD that are based on a technology called x86. But HP, which jointly developed Itanium with Intel in the 1990s, continues to use that chip for three lines of large systems used for heavy-duty computing jobs.

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Rambus had sought $4 billion in direct damages for the harm it allegedly suffered in the case, an amount that can be instantly tripled under California law. It also asked for punitive damages.

Rambus, a Silicon Valley designer of technology used in memory chips, accused Micron and Hynix of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to prevent Rambus technology from gaining traction in the market and fixing the price of memory chips.

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The technology allows Internet browsers to display jazzed-up images and effects that react to users’ actions, delivering game-like interactivity without installing additional software. Developers can use HTML5 to get their creations on a variety of smartphones, tablets and PCs without tailoring apps for specific hardware or the online stores that have become gatekeepers to mobile commerce.

That promise—and the lure of Apple Inc. devices in particular—is sweeping aside alternative technologies. In the latest development, Adobe Systems Inc. said Wednesday it will pull back on pushing the rival Flash format opposed by Mr. Jobs for mobile devices.

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The San Diego-based company, known for selling communications chips as well as licensing patents to handset makers, also said it is reaping the benefits as consumers in emerging markets adopt cellphones that use faster 3G cellular networks.

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Thursday the leader of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s board reversed his position on Leo Apotheker, a man Mr. Lane has known for 20 years and last fall called “ideally suited” to run H-P. The two men were appointed at the same time and worked closely together during Mr. Apotheker’s 11-month tenure as CEO. He was ousted Thursday.

In a 2010 interview, Mr. Lane, now 64 years old, said one reason he joined H-P’s board was the chance to work with Mr. Apotheker. He subsequently helped engineer a restructuring of the board that in January removed four directors and named five new ones.

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When Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. reports its second-quarter results Thursday, all eyes will be on how the U.S. cellphone maker is handling its separation from the more stable network-technology business, which now exists as Motorola Solutions Inc. Since the Jan. 4 split, Mobility’s shares are down 26 percent while Solution’s shares are up 15 percent.

The split-up was made possible by a recovery at the cellphone unit, which came back from years of internal turmoil to sell nearly 14 million smartphones last year — largely thanks to a joint effort with Verizon Wireless and Google Inc. That three-way partnership produced the Droid lineup and captured consumers who were yearning for an iPhone-like device but couldn’t or didn’t want to switch to the Apple Inc. phone’s exclusive U.S. carrier at the time, AT&T Inc.

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s search for a new chief executive has entered its seventh month, a delay seen as an indicator of the challenges facing the chip maker’s next leader.

A number of prominent executives—including Michael Capellas, the former chief of WorldCom Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp., and William Nuti, chief executive of computer maker NCR Corp.—have turned down approaches by AMD since the company’s board forced out its leader in January, people familiar with the situation said.

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“We were too complex,” Mr. Chambers told a gathering at a company event here that drew more than 15,000 customers and other attendees. “You will see us leaner and more focused.”

Mr. Chambers said the reorganization, which the company has been promising since mid-May, will cut the number of groups involved in developing new products. For example, multiple groups that create operating systems for Cisco will be combined into one, he said. The company also will streamline Cisco’s sales organization, Chambers said.

“The market is changing, and we are going to change faster than anyone else,” Mr. Chambers said.

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On Tuesday the Silicon Valley giant is expected to announce an overhaul of its most popular product, a switching system called the Catalyst 6500 that it estimates has generated $42 billion in revenue since 1999.

The hardware is a mainstay for linking computers together on corporate networks—and a big target for competitors such as Hewlett-Packard Co., whose rivalry with Cisco has become increasingly intense. Cisco, which is unveiling the new technology this week at a company event in Las Vegas, hopes to keep customers from defecting by offering them an easy way to upgrade.

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The system, being built in the city of Chongqing over the next two to three years, is among the largest and most sophisticated video surveillance projects of its kind in China and perhaps the world. Dubbed “Peaceful Chongqing,” it is planned to cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles, an area more than 25 percent larger than New York City.

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The Milpitas, Calif. company sprung from the spinoff of the manufacturing operations of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and was later combined with Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd.

Globalfoundries said Chief Executive Doug Grose, a former AMD executive who spent 25 years at International Business Machines Corp., will step down and become a senior advisor to the company. Chief Operating Officer Chia Song Hwee, Chartered’s former CEO, will step down in August and return to Singapore, the company said.

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The computer maker Thursday said it built an integrated circuit from graphene that operates at up to 10 gigahertz, suggesting even higher frequencies were possible–-up in the ranges favored for applications like military communications.

Perhaps more significantly, IBM said the research showed proved that graphene can be fabricated on a wafer–-the technique used in making ordinary chips–-and that a graphene transistor can be bonded with components made with conventional materials. Those have been big challenges in working with the material so far.

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The Livermore, Calif., company on Tuesday claimed a breakthrough in using the material to fabricate light-emitting diodes, the new-wave components that are finding a place in many lighting applications because of their superior energy-efficiency and longevity. A key barrier to their wider use is high cost–$40 price tags aren’t uncommon for 60-watt equivalent bulbs–and that’s where silicon could come in.

Most LEDs are now fabricated on substrates of relatively costly materials such as sapphire or silicon carbide. Many companies are putting most of their efforts in trying to use larger substrates of the same materials to drive down costs, says Bill Watkins, Bridgelux’s CEO.

A more radical approach is to move to silicon, the foundation of computer chips. Besides the cost advantage of the material, the approach could theoretically make use of the many older semiconductor factories that are inexpensive to operate.

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The White House is announcing that Otellini will be named to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt chairs the group, which was created by an executive order in January. Other members are expected to be named in coming weeks.

News of Otellini’s appointment is a highlight of the president’s trip west this week, which kicked off with a meeting Thursday night with tech CEOs that include Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Cisco’s John Chambers. The meeting was held at the Woodside, Calif., home of John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist.

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Seifert, AMD’s chief financial officer, was elevated in January to interim chief executive following the sudden departure of Dirk Meyer. He said he immediately opted to take his name out of consideration for the permanent CEO job, because he wanted to avoid any indication that friction among AMD senior executives could have been a factor in Meyer’s resignation.

The management change “was a board decision,” Seifert said Wednesday, in an interview following his appearance at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. “I was as surprised as anybody else.”

The board, Seifert said, did not act because of anything the popular CEO had done or not done, but questions about AMD’s future. “Are we on the right trajectory? Do we set our objectives high enough?” Seifert said. In considering such questions, he said, directors concluded a different set of skills than Meyer’s were needed–prompting a CEO search that is now underway.

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Qualcomm, for instance, used the Mobile World Congress to describe what may be a high water mark for gigahertz ratings among chips based on the widely used designs from ARM Holdings. But power consumption of future chips–including one discussed in a sneak preview by Intel–may be at least as important in the battle to supply future smartphones and tablet PCs.

Clock speed, measured in gigahertz–billions of cycles per second–is a bit like revolutions per minute, or RPM, in a car; it shows the speed of internal timing pulses in a chip rather than how much computing work gets done.

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An industry group that includes influential players like IBM and ARM Holdings on Thursday is talking up the progress of one particular production recipe. It is a variant of a technology called “silicon-on-insulator,” or SOI, which has been used by IBM and others such as Advanced Micro Devices to make chips that are mainly known for high performance.

The group, called the SOI Industry Consortium, says they now have data to back up a claim that the version called fully-depleted SOI can play a major role in a different sort of application altogether–portable, battery-powered devices where power consumption is paramount.

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Their concerns came to a head after a November meeting between the CEO and fellow directors to review AMD’s strategy. More recently, directors lined up against the longtime AMD executive, forcing his sudden departure on Monday, a move that surprised investors and sent shares in the microprocessor maker tumbling.

Mr. Meyer, who was named CEO in July 2008 after holding chief operating officer and engineering posts at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, had performed well at cost-cutting and building products to continue its longtime battle against Intel Corp. in chips that power personal computers, those people said. But board members were not persuaded that Mr. Meyer had a convincing strategy for expanding into new semiconductor markets, including devices for tablet computers, they added.

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That would be UltraViolet, the name for a new format that is designed to break through what backers say are some key obstacles that are slowing down purchases of digital movies and TV shows. One of the biggest fears among consumers, they say, is that a movie they download or buy on disk will someday become lost or hard to access–because their computer or other hardware might crash, formats might change or other issues.

A consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content System, or DECE, has been working on a solution for some time now. They plan to offer a scheme under which consumers, instead of buying just a disk or a digital file, essentially buy a perpetual right to a piece of content. If they lose the original copy, there will always be one they can access in the cloud, as people in Silicon Valley like to put it.

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The complaint alleges that Fanny Wang Headphone Co., a startup based in Danville, Calif., is selling “nearly identical” knockoffs of the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones distributed by Monster and produced by Beats Electronics–iconic products that sprung from a collaboration of the celebrity rapper-producer and music mogul Jimmy Iovine.

Those two companies sued Fanny Wang, alleging patent infringement, unfair competition and “trade dress” infringement, or trading off the reputation of Beats headphones in ways that could cause consumers to confuse the competing products.

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