Forrester CEO George Colony listed them last week:

• Intel's chips are primarily sold inside desktop and notebook PCs. IT spending is now spread out elsewhere, so that Intel is no longer one component of a Windows/Intel monopoly.
• Virtualization software, which runs many server environments simultaneously on one chip, has reduced the demand for Intel-based servers.
• Companies are laying off employees, not buying them new computers.

1) Intel is not the bellwether that it once was. Personal computers and servers, the primary destination for Intel's processors, are not nearly as large a percentage of tech spending as they were back in 2001.

2) Layoffs in the economy have already begun. Fewer employees, fewer PCs needed.

3) Large companies are accelerating virtualization projects. Virtualization is a fancy word for running more applications on fewer servers. It is greener (less power), simpler (fewer servers to break), and cheaper. Good for companies looking to lower capital expenditure and operating expenses in a recession, but bad for Intel.

One company which listened, to its detriment, to shareholders was Microsoft. When Bill Gates ran the software company, he liked to keep a year's worth of expenses on hand, in case things went awry. Microsoft is no longer quite so stingy with its cash; it dribbles some out in dividends, and gave shareholders a $32 billion payout a few years back. Good thing it didn't shell out $44 billion for Yahoo; that deal would have left it cash-poor and debt-ridden, at exactly the wrong time. Even so, Microsoft's balance sheet is no longer the most sterling in tech.

So who's got cash on hand? Here are the 10 richest tech companies, from a Yahoo Finance screening. (I left out companies, like IBM, whose cash was matched by equally outsized debts.)

1. China Mobile, $31.0 billion
   China's oil, steel, and finance giants are investing overseas. Why not its leading wireless company? Yes, China censors its citizens. That was a trendy thing to worry about in August 2008.
2. Cisco Systems, $26.2 billion
   Cisco's so proud of its cash pile, its investor-relations chief has blogged about it. If only investors had any confidence in Cisco's bizarre social-network acquisition strategy, which has nothing to do with its fine telecom-equipment assets. Memo to Cisco's M&A team: Just because it has the word "network" in it doesn't mean you have to buy it.
3. Microsoft, $21.2 billion
   The $44 billion Yahoo offer was half in cash, half in stock, which would have strained Microsoft's finances and required it to take on some debt. Good thing it fell through.
4. Apple, $20.7 billion
   In the '90s, Apple almost ran out of money. No danger of that happening soon. Ever-secretive Apple rarely makes big, splashy acquisitions; that could change if the right bargain comes along.
5. Google, $12.7 billion
   A slumping share price may mean more acquisitions done for cash.
6. Intel, $12.0 billion
   Intel's chip factories require billions of dollars in investment; count on Intel to spend its money there, rather than on cute Web companies.
7. Nokia, $10.8 billion
   Like Cisco, Nokia's eager to be more of a Web player. Blogging and lifecasting are particular areas of interest. The cell-phone maker could throw investors a curveball and buy, say, Six Apart, Automattic, or Tumblr.
8. Dell, $9.0 billion
   Dell could have more cash on its hands if it manages to sell its PC factories, a move it's considering as HP chips away at its business. On the shopping list: software and services.
9. Motorola, $7.2 billion
   It's hard to see Motorola being an active acquirer until it figures out what to do with its cell-phone business.
10. Taiwan Semiconductor, $7.0 billion
    AMD's only worth $2.6 billion, and TSMC already makes some chips for it. Why not just buy it?

Ignition Partners, which put in $19 million of the $50 million in venture capital, is playing dumb, insisting it never would have invested had it known the company's true financial condition. But Entellium, which started in Malaysia in 2000, was trouble from the start. It went through a period, after the popping of the bubble, when employees went unpaid.

Since then, it attracted investments from Ignition and others, including Intel Capital, West River Capital, Sigma Ventures, and Mavcap, a Malaysian venture fund. Are we to believe that all of these investors committed their limited partners' money without a thorough audit?

Silicon Valley Bank, a tipster tells us, loaned Entellium millions of dollars and acted as the company's bank. It examined the company's books quarterly for the past three years — part of the normal loan-review process — and surely was aware of how much money was flowing into its accounts — or rather, not flowing in.

Montgomery Securities and Cascadia Capital helped Entellium raise money. Were they, too, deceived as to the company's financial condition when they presented venture capitalists with its numbers?

It is possible that Johnston and Jones are very clever fellows. But a scenario where they simply got away with defrauding every financial institution they dealt with beggars belief. The alternative scenario: That at least some of Entellium's backers were aware of the fraud, and invested in the hope that it would become someone else's problem soon enough.

We've been focused too much on software and content, even though we know there's someone from SanDisk who just flipped their lid on the playa. Likewise, there must be some poor pacifist at PA Semi who, all too happy to get sold to Apple, learned they had to continue engineering chip fab designs for jets, subs and choppers. I mean, c'mon, AMD minions, can you come up with no good dirt on Intel executives? I yearn to hear the stories from the actual front lines of technology, and not from the front of the line at the British Bankers Club or 111 Minna. Do tell. (Photo by Marcin Wichary)

Eygptian civil engineer Mamdouh Hamza offered to pay a hired killer $100,000 to assassinate an Egyptian government minister and three other government officials. Hamza called his plan "the final solution." The hired killer — actually an undercover British police officer — arrested Hamza, who went to trial in 2005.

In 2006, prosecutors charged Chinese national and Canadian citizen Xiaodong Sheldon Meng with 36 felonies, including economic espionage to benefit a foreign government. Meng's crime? Stealing code his former employer, Silicon Valley-based Quantum3D uses in fighter-pilot training software. A judge sentenced Meng to 24 months earlier this summer.

In 2007, Lan Lee, 42, of Palo Alto, and Yuefei Ge, 34, a Chinese national living in San Jose also faced charges of economic espionage after prosecutors accused the pair of stealing computer chips from Mountain View-based NetLogic Microsystems with plans on selling them to the Chinese government. Their indictment alleges the pair formed a company, Sico Microsystems, in order to create new chips based on stolen designs.

In May 1995, Silicon Valley engineer Bill Gaede rushed into a New York Times office and told a reporter: "I'm a spy, and I think they're going to kill me, so I want you to know what has happened." Gaede claimed he'd stolen computer chip designs from Intel and tried to sell them to Cuba, China and Iran before the CIA got onto his case and began hunting him down. The Times reporter didn't believe it at first, but it all turned out to be true. Gaede began serving a 33-month sentence in July 1996.

Richard Wade Farley goes by three names in the newspapers — never a good sign. In 1988, Farley was fired from Sunnyvale-based ESL, accused of sexual harrassment. Not long after, he returned with a shotgun. Seven of his former coworkers died. He barricaded himself in the office for six hours before police dragged him out.

In a way that reminded some of Farley's rampage, recently fired NEC Electronics employee Kenneth M. McMurray came back to his old office and forced Maria Elizabeth Lualhati, his ex-girlfriend and an associate systems programmer, into a lab where he shot her and then himself.

Aptix founder and ex-CEO Amr Mohsen faced charges of perjury, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice after prosecutors said he forged engineering notebooks in a failed attempt to sue a rival for patent infringement. When that case started to go against Mohsen, he allegedly told another inmate he wanted the judge to "disappear." The plan failed. Mohsen was sentenced to 17 years on January 5, 2007. According to AmrMohsen.com, "Amr and the family believe the 17-year punishment to be excessive."

Legendary Linux developer Hans Reiser, a hero to the open-source community, murdered his wife, Nina. He swore to his innocence almost up to the very end — until a judge agreed to reduce his sentence if he led police to her body. He eventually did. The reaction from Reiser's most ardent defenders: "Whoops."

When Apple bought PA Semi in the spring, we thought Steve Jobs was looking for leverage in his negotiations with Intel for more custom designs. If Apple really is going to go back to designing its own motherboards — as it did before the Intel switch — then Intel may have called Jobs's bluff. Not that that's a bad thing for PA Semi's designers — working on Mac circuitry seems more appealing than tending to Pentagon contracts, as they were doing before.

(Intel Outside image via Loren Petrich)

The plan is for companies that buy into Allied Security to buy up unused patents, issue themselves nonexclusive licenses for a song and then sell the patents. While it's not clear if Allied Security is a nonprofit, former IBM veep Brian Hinman who heads up the organization asserts it's not a profit-making venture. IBM, of course, has done much to refashion itself as a promoter and producer of open-source software — something anathema to Microsoft's culture.

The same can't be said of Intellectual Ventures, which was founded by former Microsofties Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, Intel's Peter Detkin, and Gregory Gorder of Seattle law firm Perkins Coie, which counts Microsoft as a top client. Myhrvold has been buying up patents left and right, and while his company has yet to sue anyone, he hasn't ruled it out. Microsoft executives have traditionally aped Bill Gates hard-line rhetoric when it comes to intellectual property, and there's little reason to believe Myhrvold and company are any different. While Google is also an investor in the fund (along with Apple and eBay), the Mountain View company must be worried enough about the fund's plans and ties to have helped create a potential competitor.

In other words, if Intellectual Ventures continued to aggregate patents in a competitive vacuum, it could become just as if not more dangerous a monopoly than Microsoft in the company's heyday by commanding premium royalties or denying access to patents entirely in order to hobble products and competitors. It's yet to be seen if Intellectual Ventures will carry water for the Redmond software giant in court, and for now, Allied Security is collection of legal documents and yet an actual owner of patents, but this could shape up to be one of the most boringly important battles in the coming years.

The new branding effort will solve a problem of AMD's own making; with the purchase of ATI, a graphics-chip company, AMD signaled that it was more interested in winning business from videogamers and other consumers. Intel, meanwhile, remained the safe choice for companies to buy; no purchasing executive would blink at approving an order for PCs with Intel inside.

For years, Ruiz tried to beat Intel on technical prowess alone — "multicore" chips, "hyperthreading," and so on. That worked for a while: People were so amazed that AMD, long an Intel copycat, was beating its rival, that they bought more chips, perhaps out of the sheer novelty of it all. That Ruiz is now thinking about how his chips are packaged and sold is wise. But late.

(Photoillustration via Hexus)

Likely not. Expect to read lots of gadget-press slavering over PA Semi's speeds and feeds, and debate over its chips' suitability for an iPhone. That may well have nothing to do with why Apple bought the company.

PA Semi's prize is its founder, Dan Dobberpuhl, a famed chip designer, and his 150-person staff. At less than $2 million per engineer, the price Apple paid is in the range Cisco pays to snap up talented engineers. With them working at Apple, Jobs can push established chipmakers to adopt its technical innovations and perhaps swap licenses for intellectual property. That's far more likely than actually switching away from Intel chips for the Mac; Apple actually explored using PA Semi's chips before choosing Intel. Even the iPhone, which would benefit more from PA Semi's low-power chips, is an unlikely candidate for an all-new chip design.

Why? Volume economics favor Intel and Samsung so strongly that it's hard to imagine that a new microprocessor design from the PA Semi team could replace their wares. $278 million doesn't buy Jobs a rival chip; it buys him a tool to chip away at his suppliers' prices.

It doesn't necessarily sell more hardware but it does provide end users with a richer browser experience, said Jeff Klaus, marketing director for Intel Mash Maker, who admitted that the product is a bit of a departure for the company.

There's just one problem. AMD has survived as an also-ran to Intel because of a cross-licensing agreement that gives it access to Intel technology. That agreement would not transfer to Nvidia, and Intel's unlikely to strike a new deal with Nvidia. Antitrust concerns would also be significant as AMD recently bought Nvidia's biggest competitor, ATI. Then again, those same worries could work in Nvidia's favor. Since Intel is aggressively moving into Nvidia's graphics market, regulators might force it to strike a deal.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

When I joined the board, the company was spending $5 billion a year on R&D and the board was oblivious. So we established this committee. It met the day before the board meetings and got into the strategic aspect of HP. Made it possible for Carly [Fiorina] and Mark [Hurd] to take risks. HP had had a very liberal technology licensing policy, actually paying out $100 million a year in royalties. At the first meeting of the technology committee we changed that. I insisted that every single license had to be signed by Fiorina. The second thing we did was get serious against Dell Direct. But the most important thing was we encouraged the company to redirect a lot of purchases of microprocessors to AMD from Intel.