ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

Carphone Warehouse (CPW) sees a "good" fiscal Q1 2013 with sales growing by 10.6% Y-o-Y (or 13.2% if one excludes France) after it completes the acquisition of the Best Buy 50% stake in CPW Europe.

The acquisition is worth $775 million in cash and stocks, and will be fully consolidated within the CPW group.

Driving CPW sales are strong growth in the postpay category in the UK and consumer preferences shifting towards high-end smartphones.

"We believe the Group is well positioned following the strategic moves we have made and we are focused on replicating the UK's operational execution across Europe and bringing our Connected World capabilities to other business partners, including our recently announced partnerships with Media Markt/Saturn and Metro Group," CPW CEO Roger Taylor says.

AMD Q2 2013 losses total $74 million from revenues reaching $1.16 billion with 7% Q-o-Q growth (or -18% Y-o-Y decline) as it sees falling graphics product shipments and a sequential increase in computing products.

However the company says it is still on the way to growth, and should become profitable in Q3 2013.

"Our focus on restructuring and transforming AMD resulted in improved financial results," AMD CEO Rory Read says. "Our performance in Q2 2013 was driven by opportunities in our new high-growth and traditional PC businesses. Looking ahead, we will continue to deliver a strong value proposition to our established customers and also reach new customers as we diversify our business"

Reveues from the AMD Computing Solutions (CS) segment (covering CPUs, APUs, chipsets, embedded processors and server chips) total $841 million with 12% Q-o-Q growth (and Y-o-Y declines of -20%), with by higher notebook, server and desktop unit shipments driving sequential growth.

Specially arranged sheets of nano-structured glass might make the storage material of the future, University of Southampton researchers say-- creating storage with a shelf life of over 1 million years and thermal stability of up to 1000°C.

As you might now, modern storage technologies (from magnetic tape and Blu-ray discs to HDDs and SSDs) can only hold data for a few decades or so.

“This is the first time real data has been recorded and retrieved using this technique,” lead researcher Jingyu Zhang says. “We successfully designed a new system and recorded a PDF file inside of the glass.”

A paper titled "5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass" explains the novel-sounding technology. It uses the 5 dimensions of glass-- the traditional 3 (length, width, height) plus axis orientation and "birefringence," meaning the way the material refracts light.

Intel Q2 2013 profits drop by -29% Y-o-Y to $2 billion while revenues fall by -5% to $12.8bn as a declining PC market continues to affect the biggest chip maker in the world.

Revenues however do see slight (2%) growth if taken on a Q-o-Q basis.

The Intel PC Client group sees Y-o-Y revenue declines of -7.5% (or Q-o-Q growth of 1.4%) to $8.1bn, the Data Centre group remains flat Y-o-Y and Other Architecture revenues fall by -15% Y-o-Y to $942 million.

"In the second quarter, we delivered on our quarterly outlook and made several key product announcements," recently installed CEO Brian Krzanich says. "In my first 2 months as CEO, I have listened to a wide variety of views about Intel and our industry from customers, employees and my leadership team and I am more confident than ever about our opportunity as a company."