Hasta La Gadget!

Worldwide PC micro-processor shipments jumped a record 23 percent in the third quarter, according to Monday data from IDC.

That represents an all-time high for a single quarter, driven largely by mobile PC processors for Atom-based netbooks, and particularly those made and sold in China.

“Compared to where the market was at the beginning of 2009, PC processors have come back remarkably strong,” said Shane Rau, director of semiconductor and personal computing research at IDC.

Unit sales were up 23 percent, but revenue was up only 14 percent, due to the low average selling price of netbooks. However, “since PC processor shipments overall just slightly exceeded shipments in 3Q08 – which was itself a record quarter at the time – we know that the processor market is recovering,” Rau said.

Unit sales for mobile PC processors, including Intel’s Atom processors for netbooks, grew 35.7 percent compared to the second quarter. Desktop processor sales grew 11.4 percent, while x86 server processors jumped 12.2 percent quarter over quarter.

Intel continued to dominate the space.

Get the rest of this story at pcmag.com.

Best Buy is teaming up with Sonic Solutions to provide customers on-demand access to streaming movies and TV shows.

Best Buy will embed Sonic’s Roxio CinemaNow technology on a number of devices, like web-connected TVs, portable media players, PCs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, and mobile phones. This will include a variety of manufacturers, Best Buy said, but the store did not reveal any specific companies at this time.

The multi-year agreement allows Best Buy to license Sonic’s technology to make its on-demand digital content delivery a standard feature on connected devices. As part of the deal, Best Buy purchased an undisclosed number of Sonic common stock.

When the service is in place, Best Buy customers can buy or rent from the CinemaNow catalogue, which includes access to new movies, TV shows, independent films, and older catalogue films. Some of those movies will likely be available on the same day as their DVD release, Best Buy said.

Both companies said they also plan to work with movie studios on “new service and content offerings” but did not elaborate.

Do Microsoft’s new storefronts look eerily family to you? The company’s new mall-based retail locations seem to have taken more than a few aesthetic and spiritual cues from Apple’s successful stores.

The company opened up its first location in Scottsdale, Arizona this week, and PCMag sent a photographer with a last name rather similar to our own consumer electronics managing editor. You can check out a slideshow of the company’s new Windows 7-centric location at PCMag, Surface computer included.

Microsoft opened up a second location in Mission Viejo, California, to what was apparently a rather enthusiastic reception. According to the OC Register, over 1,000 people crowded into the Orange County Mall, in an attempt to check out the new store.

Maybe it had something to do with the gift bags that Microsoft was handing out, which included a $25 Zune Pass gift card and lip balm, among other MS swag. Times are tough and lips are chapped all over, I guess.

Monster Cable occupies its own specialized niche in the technology industry: some swear that the company tempts nervous, uneducated buyers into paying for expensive audio/visual cables that they really don’t need. Beyond the hype, however, should be a realization that this is a company built on the need for bandwidth.

On Tuesday, Monster held what company executives billed as a “technology demo event” talking about the future of connectivity. A good deal of it was background on HDMI 1.4, and its bandwidth requirements, together with so-called “4K: resolutions that are coming down the pipe.

I found a couple of points noteworthy, however:  Brad Bramy, director of marketing for Silicon Image, predicted the 2010 and 2011 would be the year that the mobile and CE industries would begin to converge, offering the possibility that some of the 1.4 billion phones on the market would join some of the 160 million portable devices (such as camcorders) and offer HDMI out.