Oct. 9--Silicon Valley's largest stocks were mostly up today, and a gain by tech giant IBM helped push the Dow Jones industrial average to its highest close so far this year.

Shares of Apple, Google, Cisco Systems, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Gilead Sciences and Adobe Systems climbed. Oracle, eBay and Yahoo were lower.

Yahoo dropped 71 cents, or 4 percent, to $16.78 after Carl Icahn, who owns a stake in the Sunnyvale Internet company and is a member of its board of directors, offered mix comments about its prospects in an interview with CNBC.

"It cannot compete with a giant like Google and a giant like Microsoft," Icahn said, according to the business-news cable channel's Web site. "I think Google and Microsoft are going to be these two huge dinosaurs. I don't want to call them dinosaurs, but these behemoths that are going to war with each other."

Dow component IBM gained $3.64, or 3 percent, to $125.93. According to Bloomberg News, Barclays raised its rating on the computer hardware sector to "positive" from "neutral," saying demand is picking up for servers and storage systems.

The blue chip Dow, which also includes Cisco, Intel and HP, was up 78.07, or 0.8 percent, to 9,864.94.

Barclays also raised its rating for Milpitas chip maker LSI to "equal weight" from "under weight," according to Bloomberg. LSI closed at $5.67, up 23 cents, or 4.2 percent.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index climbed 15.35, or 0.7 percent, to 2,139.28.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index advanced 6.01, or 0.6 percent, to 1,071.49.

Contact Frank Russell at 408-920-5876. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mercspike.

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