Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers' market share for Q2'12.

The news was good, for most. Intel had gains in both desktop (13.6%) and notebook (3.8%) led mostly by Sandy Bridge. Nvidia gained in the notebook discrete segment (6%), and AMD saw gains in the discrete desktop category (2.5%).

Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $18.06 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2012. Operating income and loss per share for the quarter were $192 million and $0.06 per share.

The financial results reflect the previously announced non-cash, non-tax-deductible income statement charge of $6.19 billion for the impairment of goodwill and the deferral of $540 million of revenue related to the Windows Upgrade Offer. Adjusting for these items, non-GAAP fourth quarter revenue, operating income, and earnings per share were $18.60 billion, $6.93 billion, and $0.73 per share, which represented increases of 7%, 12%, and 6%, respectively, over the prior year period.

Dell today announced the immediate availability of new displays that combine performance and value to enable customers amazing viewing experiences. The six new displays join Dell's industry-leading portfolio of solutions, which has once again ranked #1 in flat-panel display market share in North Americai, and #2 in flat-panel shipments worldwideii, according to DisplaySearch.

The newest additions to Dell's industry-leading portfolio of displays, the new P and E displays offer customers diverse solutions that help them get the most out of every environment.

To further capitalize on the opportunity for Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) in embedded applications and form factors, AMD today announced the formation of a new Embedded Solutions Group and appointed Arun Iyengar as its corporate vice president and general manager. The AMD Embedded Solutions Group will operate as a separate business within AMD's Global Business Units under AMD Senior Vice President Lisa Su.

"AMD APUs have been extremely well received by embedded system designers who require more graphic-intensive displays and compute power, while continuing to increase our engagement with ecosystem partners to deliver a complete solution," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Global Business Units. "Arun's appointment and dedicated focus on expanding our differentiated embedded offerings will help ensure we are seizing the opportunity to expand in this rapidly growing market."

Lenovo Group today announced results for its fourth fiscal quarter and full year ended March 31, 2012. With full-year record sales of $US29.6 billion, an increase of almost 37 percent year-over-year, Lenovo finished its financial year as the world's second largest PC vendor with a record full-year market share of 12.9 percent. Throughout the year, Lenovo continued to demonstrate its ability to execute against the Company's strategy of "protect and attack," in established markets and new markets respectively, while achieving balanced growth in all geographies, customer segments and product lines. The result was a record full-year pre-tax income of $US582 million, an increase of 63 percent year-over-year.

During the fourth fiscal quarter, Lenovo's consolidated sales increased a healthy 54 percent to $US7.5 billion. For the tenth quarter in a row, the Company was the fastest growing among the top four PC vendors, with worldwide PC shipments up 44 percent year-over-year. Compared to an overall industry growth rate of just 4.6 percent year-over-year, Lenovo outgrew the overall industry for the 12th quarter in a row.

Solid manufacturing and strong pricing allowed Micron Technology Inc. and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. to post strong performances in the global NAND flash business in the fourth quarter, allowing them to narrow the gap in market share between them and the industry leaders, and setting the stage for further advances in 2012.

No. 3-ranked Micron Technology Inc. of the United States achieved 11.7 percent revenue growth in the fourth quarter compared to the third, according to a new IHS iSuppli Data Flash Market Tracker report from information and analytics provider IHS. Meanwhile, fourth-placed Hynix Semiconductor Inc. of South Korea expanded its revenue by 5.4 percent, as presented in the table below.

AMD gained CPU market share at Intel's expense in the first-quarter of 2012, according to the latest data by Mercury Research. Intel's CPU market share dropped from 81 percent last quarter, to 80.2 percent, while AMD's rose from 18.2 percent to 19.1 percent. Principal analyst at Mercury Research, Dean McCarron said that AMD benefited from improvements in hard drive supplies. AMD is strong in desktop processors, with 43 percent of the market, the same as last year. Customers also opted for lower-priced laptops, many of which had AMD's chips. Supplies of AMD's A-series chips code-named Llano were restored after manufacturing issues were resolved, McCarron said.

A Flashback trojan that affected over 600,000 OS X machines with relative ease, earlier this month, exposed gaping holes in the OS X software architecture and got industry experts discussing how competent Apple is at dealing with the threat of malware, on its end. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of security company Kaspersky Lab, believes that Apple is "10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security," and the ease with which scores of OS X machines could be compromised by malware in the recent times formed the basis of his assertion.

"For many years I've been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It's always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms," Kaspersky commented. Increase in malware and cybercrime against OS X machines, according to him are "just a question of time and market share. Cyber criminals have now recognised that Mac is an interesting area. Now we have more, it's not just Flashback or Flashfake. Welcome to Microsoft's world, Mac. It's full of malware."

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent of search queries conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.3 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.7 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated mobile devices graphics chip shipments for 2011. Mobile devices include smartphones, tablets, cameras, vehicles, and game consoles.

The market for smart mobile devices is soaring. Mobile devices are not necessarily replacing the PC, but they are outselling PCs. Increasingly mobile devices have a graphics processor and those processors are integrated in the device's system on a chip (SoC) application processor.

The workstation market proceeded ahead in the fourth quarter of 2011, completing a long climb back from the 2009 depths of the global economic recession that had slashed its shipments by over 40 percent. But that fourth quarter advance was more a case of "steady as she goes" than "full speed ahead", reports Jon Peddie Research senior analyst Alex Herrera.

The leading market research firm has completed its data collection and analysis of results from the quarter, and finds Q4 followed the same basic storyline Herrera had been laying out over the previous few quarters. The market has not only fully recovered from the recession, it's showing continued stability and some undeniable signs of strength. But at the same time, there remain scattered pockets of concern, as the market has yet to resume the pace of growth it sustained back in the years 2005 through 2008.

According to comScore, the month of January has seen all major players in the US Internet search market keep the positions held at the end of 2012. Still, there have been small changes as Google increased its share to 66.2% (66.1% in the previous month) while Yahoo dropped a little, from 16.2% in December to 16.0%.

Following Google and Yahoo was Microsoft with a 13.8% market share, while on the fourth and fifth places in January's top we have Ask and AOL with 2.6% and 1.4%, respectively. Almost 20 billion core search queries were conducted in the US in January.

Lenovo Group reported results for its third fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2011, highlighted by record highs in quarterly sales, pre-tax income and market share, and the 11th quarter in a row that Lenovo has grown faster than the industry as a whole. For the ninth quarter in a row, the Company grew faster than any of the top four PC manufacturers, a result of Lenovo's continued focus on balanced growth across all geographies, customer segments and product lines. During the third quarter, Lenovo recorded its highest-ever worldwide market share of 14.0* percent, and its highest-ever market share in China of 35.3 percent, an increase of 3.7 and 3.1 share points year-over-year respectively.

During the third fiscal quarter Lenovo's pre-tax income increased 59 percent year-over-year, to a record high of US$192 million.

Following reports that Kingston is reducing prices of its NAND flash-based products by up to 15%, SanDisk too is reportedly preparing price-cuts of its own. Unlike Kingston, SanDisk's entire product portfolio is connected with NAND flash memory, it is the world's largest vendor of memory cards, and also has a vast lineup of USB flash drives. SanDisk will lower its prices just enough to maintain competitiveness with Kingston's products. The company maintains that initiating a price-cutting strategy is intended to boost sales volume and maintain the company's leading market share. According to DRAMeXchange, major NAND flash vendors are initiating price cuts to clear inventories, to make way for flash memory built on newer fabrication technologies.

Two in every three socket LGA2011 motherboards based on the Intel X79 chipset, globally, are ASUS. The company has amassed 70% global market share of X79 motherboards, according to the latest sales data given out by the company. That's not all, the same data claims ASUS globally holds 50% of the Z68 motherboard market, and 60% of the P67 motherboard market. ASUS' X79 motherboard lineup includes four models in the P9X79 series: the P9X79, P9X79 Pro, P9X79 Deluxe, P9X79 WS; three models in the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Rampage IV series: the Rampage IV Extreme, Rampage IV Formula, and Rampage IV Gene; and Sabertooth X79.

After overtaking Mozilla Firefox in terms of web-browser market-share in December 2011, Google Chrome has its eyes trained on Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), still the most popular web-browser in use today. According to the most recent StatCounter figures, at the rate at which Google Chrome's market-share is growing, it will overtake that of MSIE in 2012. It will do that as early as in June-July. Interestingly, Google Chrome is the youngest web-browser among its competitors, launched in Q4 2008, but has surpassed the market shares of much older competitors in a matter of months. Apart from stats, Google's web-advertising prowess makes Chrome's MSIE overtake in June-July seem realistic.

Optical disc drives have been pretty cheap for years now, yet there is enough money in the business, that three executives managed to collude in price fixing of these devices, scamming HP, Dell and Microsoft in the process - and in the end the consumer, who foots the higher prices. The three are from Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. (HLDS) and have reached a plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on price fixing charges for optical disc drives during the 2005-2009 timeframe. According to Security Week, the three executives, Sang Hun Kim, Young Keun Park, and Sik Hur, will each pay $25,000 USD in fines and serve little sentences of seven to eight months in prison at a "correctional facility" aka prison, that is yet to be decided.

According to the latest data sourced by StatCounter for the month of November 2011, Google Chrome has overtaken Mozilla Firefox in terms of web-browser software market-share. The GlobalStats data provides a worldwide picture, and not just specific to a region. According to the data, Chrome took 25.69% of the worldwide market (up from 4.66% in November 2009) compared to Firefox's 25.23%.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%. Google Chrome began in mid-2008 as an experimental minimalist UI web-browser based on the Chromium project, it is a multi-process tabbed web browser based on Apple Webkit and several other pieces of free, licensed, and open-source technologies. Its market share is on the rise. The stats can be accessed here.

Hot on the heels of our previous story of Apple Macs falling prey to a DDoS trojan, we now have another Mac trojan come on the market, as explained by Sophos. Yes, the Apple platform must indeed be becoming more popular to get this one. It's an unfortunate fact of life that the popularity of any computing platform, including smartphones, can be judged by the number of criminals who will attack it. This little nasty, called OSX/Miner-D or 'DevilRobber', hijacks Mac OS X to perform various tricks, which include minting Bitcoins (the virtual and now virtually worthless currency) stealing usernames and passwords (of course) taking screenshots and stealing the victim's Bitcoin wallet while it's at it, if there is one. And for good measure:

it runs a script that copies information to a file called dump.txt regarding truecrypt data, Vidalia (TOR plugin for Firefox), your Safari browsing history, and .bash_history.

So, now the criminals also know about all the sites one has visited, eroding user privacy even more. It looks like this malware has covered all the bases, but wait, there's more.

The latest data from Jon Peddie Research, which is known for closely tracking the PC graphics hardware industry, claims that the PC graphics industry has stabilized and returned to a more predictable path in Q3 2011. Shipments have increased 16.7% sequentially, and 18.4% compared to Q3 2010 (year over year). Much of this is attributed to the market success of Intel "Sandy Bridge" Core processors, which has also worked to increase Intel's market share. Intel is the market leader in PC graphics, with AMD in the second place, and NVIDIA third.

Intel holds 60.4% of the market, a significant increase from the 54.8% it held in Q2 2011. It grew at the expense of both AMD and NVIDIA. AMD's share slipped a little, despite the introduction of new A-Series "Llano" accelerated processing units. AMD holds 23% of the market, down from the 24.4% it held in Q2. NVIDIA is in a bit of trouble. The green team holds 16.1% of the market, down from 20.1% it held in Q2. This is attributed to its exit from integrated graphics. Its discrete GPU business still sees growth.

BF3 and MW3 are both being released at nearly the same time, just a couple of weeks apart. Since they both target the same high-end gaming audience, there's going to be some very stiff competition indeed between the two games. What's interesting is the chest-beating that Patrick Liu, producer of developer DICE, is doing. He believes that BF3 will take on and make a severe dent in market share for MW3, although he admits that Activision will be hard to push aside:"From what I've seen of Modern Warfare 3 it looks great, as usual. I think we're going to put a huge dent, so to speak, in [Activision's] market, but they're a behemoth. It's not easy to move them... although I believe that we have already done that, with Battlefield 3's campaign so far. But at the same time, from a developer standpoint, we really focus on creating our own game and making the best that we can. We set the bar quite high for ourselves, and that's usually the biggest challenge for us." From the looks of it though, it looks like he wanted to set it even higher, but it would have taken too much time:"I know that the game is never actually done - we can always improve the game. We have lots of ideas on how to improve this, so if we could we would push Battlefield 3 back a year or two maybe. But that wouldn't make any sense. So the biggest challenge is really our own requirements for ourselves." Who wins the battle of the ratings remains to be seen.

Microsoft's first attempt at replacing XP with Vista failed miserably, since Vista had many initial issues and was so poorly received, that the brand was irrevocably tarnished. However, Microsoft's second attempt with Windows 7 has been very successful, since it has always worked very well, even during its development phase and is well liked. Now, if figures from Stat Counter are to be believed, then Windows 7's share of the market has climbed to 41.64%, while Windows XP has dropped to 37.20% - still a hefty percentage and one that Microsoft will be keen to see drop to zero as soon as possible. This means that Windows 7 is now finally the most popular Windows version after almost two years since the retail version was released on October 22nd 2009, with Windows 8 due out likely in summer 2012.

AMD announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Rory P. Read, 49, President and Chief Executive Officer of AMD, effective today. Mr. Read has also been appointed to the Company's board of directors. Read joins AMD from Lenovo Group, Ltd., where he was most recently President and Chief Operating Officer responsible for leading day-to-day global operations while overseeing the development and implementation of the company's growth strategy.

"Rory is a proven leader with an impressive record of driving profitable growth," said Bruce Claflin, Chairman of AMD's Board of Directors. "He is ideally suited to accelerate AMD's evolution into the world's leading semiconductor design company. As President and COO of Lenovo he helped take the company into dynamic new markets while growing market share and expanding profitability. His sound strategic thinking and natural customer orientation will help amplify the voice of the customer inside AMD."

Samsung is launching a new SSD 470 package with greatly enhanced user convenience features compared to the existing SSD 470 series. This July, all Samsung 470 Series SSDs will include a full copy of Norton Ghost 15.0 to greatly reduce the frustration of data migration, backup, and recovery. While the physical installation of the drive is trivial to many users, the tedious process of installing the OS, running OS updates, installing patches, reinstalling software, setting up user preferences, and migrating old data is frustrating and time-consuming. With the inclusion of Norton Ghost 15.0, the time it takes to migrate to a new SSD is reduced by up to 75 percent, meaning your new drive can be up and running in under an hour instead of nearly four.

Mozilla is so frantically inflating Firefox version numbers, that its latest alpha (Aurora) build is already at version 7, less than a month after Firefox 5 final was released. Mozilla is playing catch-up with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer in the version number game. While informed users might find this silly, perhaps there is some data motivating Mozilla to inflate its version numbers, other than the fact that Google Chrome has already grabbed 20% of the browser market share, discretely updates itself, doesn't brag too much about version numbers; and the fact that Internet Explorer is back in the race with version 9 that greatly improved performance and features.

In any case, Firefox 7 is said to bring with it some new features, including faster startup time, better rendering performance, and more importantly, lower memory footprint. It also features better font rendering when GPU acceleration is enabled. An improved Sync manager syncs bookmarks and passwords instantly with your other devices. Firefox 7 Aurora (alpha, 7.0a2) can be downloaded in a wide range of languages, and for Windows, Mac, and Linux, from this page. Aurora builds can be unstable and buggy.