Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 is a speed demon, but battery impact remains unknown

Your current smartphone's processor may be fast, but Qualcomm is hoping to show you a whole new definition of mobile performance. On Tuesday, the company staged a benchmarking exhibition in San Francisco to demonstrate the raw speed of its Snapdragon 800 chip, designated for "premium" smartphone deployment later this year.

Qualcomm already has a footprint in many of the top handsets. The 400 series of chips is included in both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example. Qualcomm hasn't announced which phones and tablets will use the 800 series, but, for what it's worth, the company showed off the new chip using the 700MHz LTE band that's specific to AT&T—although that means little at this point.

Quadrant 2.1.1 benchmark for the Qualcomm SnapDragon 800

When Qualcomm first announced the Snapdragon 400 and 800 chips at the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, the company said the 800 series will appear in "premium" mobile devices in the second half of the year and provide as much as a 75 percent performance boost over Qualcomm's current Snapdragon S4 chip.

The 800-series chips include a quad-core CPU, known as the 28-nm Krait 400, with each core running at up to 2.3 GHz. It has a new Adreno 330 GPU, integrates a 4G LTE modem for data rates of up to 150 Mbps, and supports the 802.11ac WiFi standard.

In the San Francisco press event Tuesday, Qualcomm showed off the new chip in mobile development platforms (MDPs), and gave reporters a chance to run several benchmarks on this purpose-built hardware. Not surprisingly, the Snapdragon performed swimmingly, with games like "Need for Speed: Most Wanted" running perfectly smoothly. "Epic Citadel," a tour of a medieval town powered by Epic's Unreal Engine, also ran with nary a judder, and generated an average frame rate of 59.7 frames per second at 1920-by-1008 resolution. For what it's worth, tests reported the SnapDragon 800 as a 2.27 GHz chip paired with 1.83 GB of memory.

Geekbench 2 results for the Qualcomm SnapDragon 800.

Hitting 60 frames per second in the Unreal Engine sounds great on paper, but Jeff Bier, president of embedded processor analyst firm Berkeley Design Technology, points out that numerical performance benchmarks are becoming less relevant. The most useful benchmark? One that gauges power consumption, the measurement that couldn't be qualified via benchmarks during Tuesday's testing regimen.

Regardless, using the 1.0 version of the SunSpider benchmark, Qualcomm's chip spit out results of 782.0 ms, 802.8 ms, and 821.2 ms, with an average score of 802 ms.

What are those high performance numbers good for in real life? Raj Talluri, senior vice president of product mangement for Qualcomm, said that OEMs could use the processor as "computational cameras," providing the software equivalent of the Lytro post-focusing camera technology for phones and tablets.

The 3DMark 1.1 benchmark for the Qualcomm SnapDragon 800

Qualcomm showed off the camera capturing 4K video and transferring it to a tablet using its TransferJet technology, as well as a demonstration of it playing a video of "Dead Space 3," a popular game. It's worth noting, however, that playing back 4K video will not only suck up the bulk of one's available bandwidth, but chew through data limits as well. (The SnapDragon supports both USB 3.0 as well as 4G LTE with carrier aggregation, however.)

The new Qualcomm processors will compete with Nvidia's Tegra 4, Samsung's Exynos 5, Apple's A5 and A5X, and Intel's Atom chips.

At this point, the Snapdragon 800 looks like a potential winner when it's released this fall. But doesn't everything, many months before it actually appears in shipping hardware? The real questions will be answered when the Snapdragon launches against its competition, and we get a better idea of its battery life.

Additional reporting by James Niccolai, IDG News Service

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Steve Jobs' draft email plays pivotal role in antitrust case

An email composed, but never sent, by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs may prove instrumental in the Justice Department's case that Apple, along with the five largest book publishers, colluded to fix prices for electronic books.

In a draft email intended for Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue about negotiations with one publisher, Jobs wrote of the potential deal that "I can live with this as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year. If they don't, I'm not sure we can be competitive."

For the Justice Department, Jobs' reference to Amazon showed that the company was trying to end retail price competition among electronic book vendors. However, Orin Snyder, an attorney representing Apple in the case, dismissed the significance of the email in court, noting that it was never even sent to Cue.

As the three-week trial has started to wind down, the DOJ has released a copious set of emails and other electronic documentation between Jobs, Cue -- who was in charge of the negotiations with the book publishers -- and a number of publisher executives. Judge Denise Cote for the U.S. Southern District Court of New York is presiding over the non-jury trial.

The DOJ is piecing together the documentation in an attempt to show that Apple and the five largest book publishers colluded to raise the prices of e-books in early 2010. At the time, Amazon was offering best-selling titles for US$9.99, less than what the online retailer paid for these titles. The publishers worried that Amazon, which enjoyed a 90 percent share of the electronic book market in 2009, was lowering the value of books in consumers' eyes, as well as laying plans to cut publishers out of Amazon's book sales altogether, and to deal with authors directly.

In January 2010, the five publishers -- Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster -- all signed contracts with Apple, allowing Apple to sell electronic books in an agency model. Under such an agreement, the publishers would set the prices of electronic books, chosen from a set of pricing tiers Apple formulated. Apple got a fixed 30 percent cut of each sale through its iBookstore, which would debut on the about-to-be-launched iPad.

Immediately after the contracts took effect in April 2010, and publishers moved all their retailers to the agency model, prices of electronic books offered by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble increased by almost 20 percent, the DOJ charged.

Apple, in a court filing in May, said that the publishers in 2009 had on their own pursued a so-called agency business model before meeting with Apple. (The publishers have since settled with the DOJ.) At the time, they sold electronic books to retailers on a standard wholesale model, which left retailers the freedom to charge whatever price they saw fit.

In order to prove collusion, the DOJ has to show that Apple convinced all of the publishers as a group to move to the agency model. While the DOJ has plenty of documentation of the communications between Apple and individual publishers, it has produced less evidence that Apple coordinated actions among all the publishers. The DOJ pointed to the draft Jobs email as evidence that the company was the mastermind of this coordination.

In response, the Apple defense presented on Monday five different drafts of Jobs' email, noting four of them had no reference to moving Amazon to the agency model. Snyder argued that Jobs was in the process of refining his thoughts about the contract negotiations, and that this one draft that the DOJ highlighted was written before Jobs clarified his thoughts on the subject.

"I don't think they have a very strong case," said Ankur Kapoor, an antitrust lawyer for the law firm Constantine Cannon LLP. The new email comes closer to proving conspiracy, but still isn't close enough, Kapoor said. "It would make perfect competitive sense for Apple to want Amazon to use an agency model, because that way [Amazon] wouldn't undercut Apple's sales of e-books," Kapoor said.

"What the evidence shows is that the publishers wanted to go to an agency model anyway," Kapoor said. "If they all independently wanted to do it anyway, why would they coordinate activities?"

Kapoor also noted that the DOJ will have difficulty proving that the public was harmed in the establishment of agency pricing, even if the costs of best sellers did increase across all retail outlets once the agency contracts took effect. In the interest of making the iPad a viable electronic book reader, Apple also established price caps that limited how much electronic books could cost and mandated that publishers release all their best-selling titles in electronic form when they were released, both of which arguably benefitted the public.

"That is classic competition. And when you are talking about an innovative new product like the iPad, you are talking about the most important kind of competition," Kapoor said.

Concluding arguments will be heard on Thursday, and Judge Cote is expected to make her final ruling within several weeks.

IDG News Service executive news editor Marc Ferranti contributed to the story.

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Dell committee says Icahn's new proposal is not 'actionable'

A Dell special committee has rejected a new proposal from a key shareholder Carl C. Icahn, and said it will continue to support the proposal by founder Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to take the company private.

Icahn's proposal in its present state is not a transaction that the committee could endorse and execute as "there is neither financing, nor any commitment from any party to participate, nor any remedy for the company and its shareholders if the transaction is not consummated," the special committee of the board said in a statement Tuesday. The committee was set up in August 2012 after the plans for taking the company private were revealed.

The proposal from Icahn does not adequately address the liquidity issues and other risks that were previously highlighted by the committee, it said.

Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners made an offer for Dell in February that aims to take the computers and services company private in a US$24.4 billion deal. The proposal offers to pay $13.65 per share in cash.

In his latest plan, Icahn on Tuesday proposed that Dell commence a tender offer for around 1.1 billion shares at $14 per share for a maximum of $16 billion, stating that his proposal allows those who believe that the offer from Michael Dell and Silver Lake undervalues Dell can continue to hold shares in the company. Icahn and allied investor Southeastern Asset Management will not participate in the tender, according to an open letter from Icahn to Dell shareholders.

Funding for the offer would come from $5.2 billion of debt financing, $7.5 billion from cash with Dell, and $2.9 billion through a sale of Dell's receivables, that would still leave about $4.9 billion of cash for Dell's ongoing operations, Icahn wrote. Dell's board has raised concerns about Icahn's ability to raise $5.2 billion in debt financing.

Icahn's plan would likely force shareholders to continue to own shares in the highly leveraged company that would result, the committee said.

The investor said he acquired 72 million Dell shares from Southeastern. Icahn and Southeastern hold about 13 percent of the equity of the company.

The two large shareholders in the company offered in May to give shareholders the option to continue holding shares, and take an additional $12 a share in cash or stock.( Financing for the new proposal was to come from existing cash in Dell and $5.2 billion in new debt, making it similar to a "leveraged recapitalization" proposal Icahn and related entities made in March. In a leveraged recapitalization, a company typically takes on debt in order to pay a dividend to shareholders or repurchase its own shares.(

The committee said on Tuesday it requested over a month ago financial and other information from Icahn and Southeastern in connection with the previous recapitalization plan. The requests remain outstanding and are also relevant to the latest proposal from Icahn, and the committee will consider any or all such information provided, it said.

However, in the absence of an "actionable proposal that would create more value for shareholders," the committee said it continues to recommend the pending transaction proposed by Dell and Silver Lake.

Another bidder, Blackstone Group, gave up its bid for Dell in April citing "an unprecedented 14 percent market decline in PC volume in the first quarter of 2013" and the company's eroding financial profile. Founder Dell and Silver Lake have stated that they want to take the company private to grow in new businesses like services. Icahn and Southeastern have previously dismissed concerns about the PC business and said the PC is "far from an obsolete technology." Dell can make the transition to a services company while remaining a public company, the investors added.

The dispute over the restructuring of Dell may carry over to a special meeting on July 18 at which Icahn has asked Dell shareholders to defeat the proposal from Michael Dell and Silver Lake, and then elect at an annual shareholder meeting a new panel to the board of directors that will implement the tender offer.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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AMD reboots server strategy with first ARM chips

Advanced Micro Devices is building its future server strategy around chips used in smartphones and tablets. The company said its first ARM server processors -- which will be released in the second half of next year -- will be faster and more powerful than its existing low-power x86 server processors.

AMD on Tuesday shared initial details on its 64-bit ARM chips, code-named Seattle, which will have up to 16 CPU cores. The chips will be up to four times faster and more power efficient than the quad-core Opteron X-series chips, which draw up to 11 watts of power and are based on the x86 architecture.

AMD will sell its first ARM processors alongside x86 server processors, which were also updated with new high-end Opteron chips due next year. But AMD expects ARM processors to outrun x86 chips in the long term.

ARM processors dominate the smartphone and tablet markets today, and have been considered for use in servers processing cloud and Web workloads. Hewlett-Packard and Dell have built prototype servers with low-power ARM cores on which customers can benchmark and test programs.

Observers have said the ARM-based chips could give AMD an edge over Intel, and the move could be as significant as its introduction of 64-bit server chips in 2003, and dual-core chips in 2004. Both moves gave AMD a competitive advantage over Intel, but server chip delays and the failure of chips based on the Bulldozer core ultimately cost AMD market share.

"ARM servers hit the market for real in 2014, that's the try year," said Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager of the server business unit at AMD.

By 2016 or 2017, ARM CPUs will have 20 percent of the server market, Feldman said. Right now the server market is dominated by Intel's x86 chips, but Feldman said large data centers will start porting software from x86 to ARM in 2015.

ARM CPUs, which are cheaper and ship in higher volumes compared to the more expensive x86 chips, will prevail in the end, Feldman said.

"In the history of our industry, over the past 40 years, smaller, lower-cost, higher volume CPUs have always won," Feldman said.

AMD has been losing server processor market share to Intel, and its Seattle server chips signify a big change in direction for the company. AMD broke its reliance on the x86 architecture in October last year when it announced that it had licensed ARM's 64-bit architecture and would sell ARM-based server processors next year.

AMD's ARM-based server chips will be targeted at single-socket servers and also dense servers like the company's own SeaMicro servers. AMD will start shipping test units of the chips in the first quarter of 2014.

The Seattle chips will be based on the Cortex-A57 processor design, which is ARM's first 64-bit chip. AMD's ARM CPU will be part of a chip package that will also include 10-gigabit Ethernet and the Freedom Fabric interconnect, which will connect the server CPU to other components in a server.

AMD will compete with chip makers like AppliedMicro and Calxeda, who are pursuing 64-bit ARM server chips. Mitac earlier this month announced a 64-bit ARM server called 7-Star with an AppliedMicro chip.

AMD has also taken steps to make software portable between x86 and ARM. It helped establish the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation, which aims to make applications easily portable across different chip architectures and devices including PCs, game consoles, tablets and smartphones.

AMD is also working Facebook's Open Compute Project to develop a common slot for x86 and ARM chips. That specification should make it easier to build servers in which x86 and ARM chips can be swapped.

Also coming next year are new low-power x86 Opteron chips code-named Berlin, which will double the performance of existing Opteron X-series chips. The chips will have CPUs based on the new Steamroller architecture, and internal graphics processors will help speed up computing.

AMD also updated its high-end server processor roadmap with the next-generation Opteron chip code-named Warsaw, which will be released for two- to four-socket servers in the first quarter next year. Warsaw is faster and more power efficient than existing Opteron 6300 chips, and the new chips can be slotted into existing servers running on latest Opteron processors.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

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Yahoo discloses user data requests from US law enforcement agencies

Yahoo has received between 12,000 to 13,000 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. between Dec. 1 and May 31 this year, the company said Monday.

The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell wrote in a blog post.

The company did not disclose how many of the requests for customer data were under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of a controversy after reports surfaced that the government was collecting data from a large number of users under the Act, including call metadata from telephone customers of Verizon.

"Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue," the executives wrote.

The Internet company joins other companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft that disclosed similar numbers over the weekend in a bid to convey greater transparency to their users, after reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post alleged that the U.S. National Security Agency has real-time access to content on the servers of Google, Facebook and other Internet companies as part of a surveillance program called Prism. The companies have denied their participation. (

Following widespread criticism of the U.S. government's surveillance programs and the role of the Internet companies, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft last week called for greater transparency in disclosure of data on government requests for customer information.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert Mueller, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, for example, asked that the company should be allowed to publish in its Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including disclosures under FISA, in terms of both the numbers received and their scope. Government restrictions on disclosure of the information has fueled speculation "that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users' data," Drummond added.

After obtaining limited permission from U.S. authorities, Facebook and Microsoft released data on requests from the government, but both didn't say how many were related to national security.

Facebook said it had received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all government entities in the U.S. including local authorities for the six months ending Dec. 31. The company, after discussions with security authorities, is allowed to include in a transparency report as part of an aggregate number and as a range all national security-related requests including FISA as well as National Security Letters, which was prohibited earlier. Microsoft said it had got between 6,000 and 7,000 requests affecting 31,000 to 32,000 consumer accounts for the same period.

Apple said that from Dec. 1 to May 31, it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters, it said.

Yahoo said Monday it plans to issue later this summer its first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year. Other companies like Google already provide such updates, though Facebook's General Counsel Ted Ullyot said in a post last week that the company had not issued a transparency report in the past, as it would be incomplete and misleading because of the government restrictions on disclosure.

Orders by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court often come with a "gag order" that prevents those receiving the order to publicly discuss it. The order from the court that authorized the U.S. National Security Agency to collect telephony metadata from customers of Verizon in the U.S. also came with a gag order.

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Google adds more retailers for Chromebook

Google's Chromebook laptop will be carried by over 6,600 stores around the world, as the company signs on more retailers.

Starting Monday, Walmart is offering an Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive, in about 2,800 stores across the U.S. for US$199, while from this weekend, Staples will offer Chromebooks from Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung Electronics in its over 1,500 stores in the country.

Staples will also sell the products online. The laptop running the Chrome OS is an attempt by Google to attract users to cloud computing, but it has as yet to make a significant impact in the market.

In the coming months, select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry's and TigerDirect outlets will also begin selling Chromebooks, Google said in a blog post on Monday. The new retailers join Best Buy and Amazon.com who are already selling the devices.

Google will now have three times the number of retail outlets as it expands both in the U.S. and 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, it said.

In addition to Dixons in the U.K., 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks, Google said.

The company said in March it was doubling the number of stores selling the device in the U.S. with more than 1,000 Best Buy stores expected to offer it. Google plans to introduce the Chromebooks later this year in other markets.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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Microsoft releases fix-it for Internet Explorer 8 vulnerability

Microsoft has released a temporary fix for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8, which was used by hackers in a prominent attack against the U.S. Department of Labor's website.

The problem is particularly dangerous since it can allow an attacker to install malware merely by visiting a tampered webpage. Microsoft is still working on a patch, wrote Dustin Childs, group manager for the company's Trustworthy Computing division.

"Customers should apply the Fix it or follow the workarounds listed in the advisory to help protect against the known attacks," Childs said in a statement.

The vulnerability is described as a problem in the way IE "accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated." IE versions 6, 7, 9 and 10 are not affected.

Microsoft calls the fix "CVE-2013-1347 MSHTML Shim Workaround." The company normally issues updates for its products on the second Tuesday of the month, but will issue an out-of-schedule patch if the problem is deemed serious enough.

Security vendors Invincea and AlienVault found that hackers planted attack code within a U.S. Labor Department webpage with information on toxic substances at U.S. Department of Energy facilities.

The code redirected people to another infected page within the site, which then attempted to exploit the IE 8 vulnerability. AlienVault said the hacking campaign appeared similar to a known China-based one called "DeepPanda," which installed remote-access trojans (RATs).

A large Fortune 500 company was attacked in December 2011 by DeepPanda, AlienVault said.

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New boot firmware a step toward 64-bit Windows RT

A standards organization has created a boot environment for tablets and PCs that could potentially run a 64-bit version of Windows RT.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Forum on Wednesday announced that its boot firmware specifications will now support ARMv8, a 64-bit processor architecture announced by ARM in 2011. ARM's processors are used in most smartphones and tablets, and chip makers such as Nvidia and Samsung are expected to release 64-bit processors for smartphones and tablets in the future.

Microsoft on Windows 8 and RT requires PCs and tablets to carry a feature called Secure Boot, which prevents a system from being hijacked. The Secure Boot environment is based on UEFI firmware and ARM has already said it is working with Microsoft to develop a 64-bit version of Windows for ARM-based devices. However, it is not yet clear when the OS will come out.

ARM expects 64-bit processors to start shipping later this year or early next year. Most smartphones and tablets today use 32-bit ARM processors.

The UEFI support for ARM 64-bit could be one more step to bringing Windows RT to 64-bit, though the benefits could be invisible to end users, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

"We can have a standardized firmware interface that can be used across PCs and other devices rather than having legacy BIOS," McCarron said.

UEFI has been widely adopted on PCs, so there could be a higher uptake by device makers making x86-compatible Windows tablets, McCarron said.

Only a handful of Windows RT tablets are available, although Acer is expected to release a tablet with the next version of the OS, due out in the second half of this year.

The UEFI specification supports a wide number of OSes and is used on Apple Macs. A large number of Android smartphones and tablets use customized bootloaders based on the kernels and specifications of devices. UEFI is desirable as it may bring some flexibility in mobile-device configurations, McCarron said.

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Sony profitable again, but core electronics still struggling

Sony made good on a promise to return to profitability after offloading a number of valuable assets last year, but its core electronics business is still losing money.

The Tokyo-based company said Thursday it booked a profit of ¥43 billion (US$440 million) for its fiscal year through March, a year after it posted a ¥457 billion loss, the largest since its founding. The company also increased revenue by 5 percent to ¥6.8 trillion.

The return to profit, a key promise under new CEO Kazuo Hirai, was expected after the company sold off billions of dollars worth of assets during the fiscal period, including its U.S. headquarters, a large Tokyo office complex and share holdings. A lingering worry is the company's failure to generate profit on its consumer electronics.

For the current fiscal year, the company promised a similarly modest profit of ¥50 billion, less than one percent of its projected sales of ¥7.5 trillion.

Sony has launched a new offensive in phones and tablets in recent months, with products such as its high-end Xperia Z smartphone and super-thin Xperia Tablet Z. But the company said its newly formed mobile computing division, its largest in terms of sales, had a deep operating loss. Sony did set an aggressive target for smartphones for the current year at 4.2 million, almost 30 percent higher than the 3.3 million it sold last fiscal year, in line with its goal to capture the number three spot globally behind Samsung and Apple.

The company said it hit its goal of selling 7 million PlayStation portable and Vita consoles, though it cut its goal for the current year to 5 million. This year Sony is gearing up to launch its PlayStation 4 home console, a process that could be costly as game hardware is often sold at a loss early on.

The company also failed to turn a profit in its Bravia TV business, an area it has long struggled and that is now personally managed by Hiria, although it made progress, cutting its operating loss in half from the earlier period.

While the company's electronics businesses continued to struggle, Sony got a lift from other areas of its portfolio. Its movie business increased profits on titles like "007 Skyfall" and "The Amazing Spider-Man," as well as selling rights to related merchandise, overcoming a poor showing for the remake of "Total Recall." Its financial division booked a large operating profit as the Japanese stock market continued to recover.

Sony booked a profit for the January to March quarter, in which it recorded profit for several deals to sell of holdings. Sales were up 8.3 percent from a year ago. The company's fiscal year runs from March through April.

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Microsoft extends revenue per search agreement with Yahoo

Microsoft has extended a search revenue guarantee agreement with Yahoo for one more year, amid reports that the Internet company is trying to break its 10-year agreement with Microsoft.

The Redmond, Washington, software company, has agreed to extend the guarantee for an additional 12 months starting April 1, 2013, but only in the U.S., Yahoo said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday. Microsoft had in 2011 agreed to extend the guarantee in the U.S. and Canada through March 2013.

Under a 2009 search agreement for which implementation began in February 2010, Microsoft guaranteed Yahoo's revenue per search on its properties for 18 months after the transition of its paid search services to Microsoft's platform in each market, to protect Yahoo from the impact of the transition. It was part of a broader deal by which Yahoo moved its search backend to Microsoft's Bing and its paid search services to Microsoft's platform.

The so-called RPS Guarantee was calculated based on the difference in revenue per search between the pre-transition and post-transition periods and certain other factors, as Yahoo transitioned its paid search to Microsoft platforms. "To date, there has been a gap in revenue per search between pre-transition and post-transition periods in most markets and Microsoft has been making payments under the RPS Guarantee to compensate for the difference," Yahoo said in the filing.

Yahoo said that in line with the 2009 agreement, it had completed the transition of its search to the Microsoft platform in all markets, and also transitioned paid search in several markets.

The transition of its paid search platform to Microsoft's platform and the migration of paid search advertisers and publishers are expected to continue through 2013, and possibly into 2014, Yahoo said in the filing.

Yahoo under new CEO Marissa Mayer is, however, unhappy with the progress of the deal with Microsoft, and is hoping to end the contract, if it finds a way, reported The Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed source. The newspaper outlined various options for Yahoo, including a mid-term termination of the deal in mid-2015, when either party can potentially opt out.

Yahoo and Microsoft were both expecting to benefit from the deal in terms of economies of scale in various areas including backend search technology and advertising. There has been considerable speculation previously that the alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo was in trouble. Mayer, who was formerly a top Google executive, signed an advertising deal in February with Google that would result in Google ads appearing on some of Yahoo's websites.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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