Last year, Chipzilla saw its marketshare being erroded by Samsung.

According to beancounters at Isuppli, Samsung in 2010 made significant strides towards eroding Intel's lead in the semiconductor industry. It is the first time in ten years that Chipzilla has noticed a rival and it is largely thanks to booming sales of its memory integrated circuits.

Samsung "massively outperformed" the rest of the semiconductor industry and saw a 59.1 percent increase in revenue in 2010. The semiconductor industry did pretty well and collected $304.1 billion overall in 2010, which is up 32.1 percent from $230.2 billion in 2009. Other memory suppliers including Micron, Hynix and Elpida each expanded their share of the total semiconductor market in 2010 by 1.1 percent, 0.7 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively. Hynix scored 66.2 per cent growth and Elpida managed a 63.3 percent boost.

While most people see Intel’s direct rival as AMD, Samsung has now grown into Intel’s primary rival in the overall semiconductor industry. Samsung’s chip revenue has grown by 355 percent from 3.9 percent since 2001, largely as a result of growth in the memory industry.

In 2010, the market for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) grew 75 percent, according to the report, while the NAND Flash market grew 38.6 percent. Samsung is the leading player in both markets. Intel has 13.4 percent of the total CPU market, while Samsung ranked second in with 9.2 percent of total worldwide revenue from processors in 2010.