In a deal that few saw coming, chipmaker Intel has announced plans to tie the knot with McAfee, bringing the security software vendor into the fold for $7.68 billion.

The mantra repeated today by Intel and McAfee officials alike is "energy-efficient performance, Internet connectivity and security," which will now make up the three prongs of Intel's business. As a result of the deal, software from McAfee, which will operate as a division of Intel's software and services group, will be integrated into an array of the company's chips.

In a provocative article in BusinessWeek former Intel CEO Andy Grove questions the conventional wisdom for relying on high tech start-ups for new jobs. Unemployment in Silicon Valley is even higher than the national average.

"Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975."

At this week's at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer demonstrated the long-awaited next generation of Windows smartphone software, elegantly dubbed Windows Phone Series. Yet the mid-February announcement only promises new devices "by holiday 2010" to compete with Blackberries, iPhones and new Android-based phones. And by "holiday" they likely mean Christmas/Chanukkah/Kwanzaa, not Labor Day, Columbus Day or Halloween.

As Sean notes in a comment on the news item HP Debuts Android-Based Netbook, Adds New Windows IPAQ "This will be an interesting battle to watch over the next 12 to 18 months as Android evolves."

Intel yesterday showed off Nehalem-EX, its new eight-core processor that can support 16 threads per processor and has 14 megabytes of cache. The chips, which are expected to roll out by year-end, will find themselves in a new generation of high-end server platforms.

In a video posted on the Intel site, Xeon MP product manager Kennedy Brown said that "all of the goodness that you saw launch with the Xeon 5500 efficient-performance segment will be coming to the ... higher-end segment based on servers that are four sockets and above with lots of memory." Brown claimed that the servers will produce a nine-time increase in memory bandwidth over the Xeon 7400 platform -- and have twice the memory capacity.