Chipmaker Qualcomm announced some good news for its stockholders today – its board of directors approved a 13 percent increase to the company’s quarterly cash dividend. The dividend will increase from $0.19 to $0.215, or $0.86 annually per share, and will be effective for quarterly dividends payable after March 25, 2011.

Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul E. Jacobs noted the increase was facilitated thanks to “strong cash flows.”  The news comes about a week after the company signed an agreement with Gameloft to offer mobile versions of some of the latter’s most popular titles, and a few hours before Qualcomm’s shares plummeted 2.8%. This comes after BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long cut his rating on the company, lowering the price target on Qualcomm’s stock to $56 a share from $65, claiming the chipmaker’s revenues will likely drop due to some of its customers.

From MarketWatch:

“ Long also lowered his price target on Qualcomm’s stock to $56 a share from $65, saying that the company is likely to see its earnings hampered by weakness from customers such as Nokia Corp. (NOK 8.41, +0.07, +0.85%) and Sony Ericsson.”

This slide comes a day after the Semiconductor Industry Association announced chip sales in Jan rose 14 percent from a year earlier to $25.5 billion. Members of the Association include AMD and Intel, who (unlike Qualcomm) had some pretty good news today.

EMoney Daily reports Intel unveiled the new vPro i5 CPU, which can reportedly speed up business applications by 60 percent, multitasking by 100 percent and data encryption by 300 percent. Not much was disclosed about the new business-centric technology, but VP of the Intel Architecture Group did mention the following:

“Over the last four years, Intel has updated its hardware with hardware-assisted virtualization optimized to use on any and all new virtualization software from Citrix, VMware, and Windows. No one size fits all when it comes to virtualization, therefore Intel vPro offers the flexibility to deploy a combination of desktop virtualization models.”