Prominent GPU and CPU company AMD has recently released its financial results for the second quarter of 2016. In the past, AMD has struggled to stay out of the red financially, and the results today aren’t very different, but AMD has improved its posture over 1Q16.

As seen in the table below, AMD’s revenue has grown from $823 million to $1.027 billion, rivaling revenue of 1Q15. The net loss is a net loss of $40 million, up from a net loss of $109 million in 1Q16, and $180 million in 1Q15. Similarly, the operating loss for 2Q16 is $8 million, compared to Q1’s $68 million and 1Q15’s $137 million. This change is primarily due to lower operating expenses and layoffs.

Today, Western Digital announced its earnings for the second quarter of its fiscal year. According to WDC (NASDAQ: WDC), the company had a quarterly revenue of $3.3 billion, down almost 17% from the $3.9 billion revenue they had this quarter last year. The company’s net income went down 54% over the same period -- falling from $438 million to $251 million.

Meanwhile, Western Digital’s main rival in the thinning hard drive field -- Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX) -- also released earnings reports for the second fiscal quarter. Seagate’s revenue was down from this quarter last year: 21% down from $3.7 billion, landing at $2.9 billion. Seagate’s non-GAAP net income for the quarter was 46% lower than last years -- $311 million this year versus $495mm last year.

Despite the season's best efforts to give weary editors a rest, last week remained active as ever, producing some major news items that impact 1H16.

As quickly as possible, then our news recap video:

Ubisoft's sales revenue for the first half of 2015 has dropped 60% as compared to the first half of last year. Actual profits have not yet been reported. In its official report, Ubisoft does hasten to add that they still exceeded their sales target, and that the company intends to make the majority of its sales during 2H15 with the release of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Rainbow Six Siege, Just Dance 2016, and Rayman Adventures.

Western Digital (WD) yesterday announced that they will acquire SanDisk, the third-largest manufacturer of flash memory in the world. WD is a major hard drive manufacturer with a lesser-known presence in SSDs. The company previously acquired Hitachi GST (HGST) and absorbed its hard drive division. WD is next significantly expanding its SSD presence by acquiring SanDisk for approximately $19 billion.

WD’s goal in this is to widen their market potential by getting into not only consumer SSDs, but other flash-based products. This acquisition will grant WD access to lower-cost SSD technology. WD said the deal will “double its addressable market and expand its participation in higher-growth segments.”

Microprocessor manufacturer AMD posted its third-quarter financials yesterday, reporting a ~40% revenue fall to $1.06 billion from $1.43 billion in 3Q14. AMD posted a $158 million operating loss for the quarter.

The company continues its endless restructure, the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) now largely independent, with new shifts including a separation of the ATMP group.

Activision’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft is one of the largest, longest-lived MMORPGs on the PC market. For a game originally released in 2004, currently having 5.6 million players – for a monthly subscription fee – is an impressive feat. For Activision-Blizzard, World of Warcraft has been a major source of revenue for more than a decade.

In late 2010, the game reached a total of ~12 million subscribers around the arrival of the Cataclysm expansion. Despite this impressively large player base, WoW’s size has recently seen a period of decline. This is not to suggest that WoW’s player base has shrunken steadily -- last November’s Warlords of Draenor expansion caused subscriber count to exceed 10 million -- but there’s been a loss of late.

Despite an ongoing period of general growth for the tech sector and desktop computing space, Jon Peddie Research today released a report indicating an 11% decline last quarter's GPU shipments.

The report indicates that embedded GPUs and IGPs are eroding dGPU sales. Year-to-year total GPU shipments fell 18.8%, combining the 21.7% desktop graphics decline with a 16.9% notebook dGPU decline. Note that this report represents the entire dedicated graphics industry and is not a linear representation of the gaming-only market, to which this website caters more directly.

Despite overall weak PC sales in recent years, Jon Peddie Research has projected that the computer graphics industry will exceed $235 billion by 2018, with a growth of 6.3% per year. This is due partly to the fact that the computer graphics industry is rooted in cross-platform sectors such as mobile, consoles, PC gaming, software, and workstations. For reference, the 2014 computer graphics industry was ~$184 billion (total of applications and hardware). Jon Peddie research attributes this to the move to 4K and a big boost from mobile, along with emerging technologies like 3D scanning/printing, augmented reality, and VR.

Anyone who pays attention to computing knows that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been struggling for some time. They are in the unfortunate position of being #2 (of two) for CPUs, second to Intel. AMD primarily focuses on the budget-market with APUs and CPUs that outperform Intel’s directly-competing options in that range. In the GPU market, AMD is again #2 (of two) to NVIDIA for discrete GPUs, and this is a vicious and close marketing battle.

AMD has exhibited a steady downward spiral in their stock prices for the past 4 years.