Samsung Beats Intel To Become World's Biggest Chipmaker

We've been anticipating such an announcement for a couple months, and now it's finally here: Samsung has officially bumped Intel down a peg, taking over the top slot as the world's premiere chipmaker. It has been expected for a couple months now that Samsung would announce record-breaking profits in its latest Q2 report, and that's exactly what happened. Among the details is a big tidbit: Samsung's chip business had higher sales revenue than the entirety of Intel this past quarter.

The U.S. company has had a good run, having reigned supreme as the world's top maker of computer chips for the better part of two decades, but times are changing and so is the industry. Whereas Intel had dominated thanks to its processors for personal computers, Samsung had cast a wide net, setting itself with a strong focus on mobile-centric products, among others.

Consumers have largely gravitated away from laptops and to smartphones and tablets as their primary or sole personal computing gadgets; whereas someone may upgrade their phone every year, they're likely to hang onto their laptop for years, upgrading far less often. This change has been reflected in decreasing PC shipments over the past few years.

Samsung has many things to thank for its success, the biggest one perhaps being its quick response to the changing markets. The company has also been praised for its development of new NAND flash memory and DRAM technologies. During the quarter spanning from April to the end of June, Samsung's semiconductor business alone raked in about $15.8 billion, of which $7.2 billion was operating income. Contrasting this is Intel's $14.4 billion overall revenue for the quarter.

For its part, Intel did report a huge year-on-year increase in operating profit, rising a solid 190% versus the same quarter last year. Samsung's domination holds for this past quarter, but it is anticipated the company will beat out Intel on an annual basis in the near future.