The latest numbers were released this week by market research firm iSuppli and predict that the revenue for the microprocessor market will plummet 12.4% in 2009. That is a loss of $32 billion compared to 2008. Despite the grim outlook for the year, things were not as bad as they could have been for the industry. The decline for the year was predicted to be over 20%.

iSuppli's Dale ford said, "There was little room for anything but pessimism after the industry suffered a sequential revenue decline of 21.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and an 18 percent drop in the first quarter of 2009. However, semiconductor sales rebounded smartly after that. … This strong rebound means 2009 will be much less painful than had been feared earlier in the year."

The only semiconductor supplier in the top ten to post a profit was second place Samsung. What has helped Samsung post a profit is its memory business. Samsung is tops in both the NAND and DRAM memory market. These markets are doing much better than the microprocessor market at this time.

Ford said, "Samsung is benefiting from its dominance in the memory market, whose performance was dramatically better than the semiconductor industry as a whole."

According to iSuppli's numbers, Qualcomm's revenue will remain flat thanks to its baseband chip market for cell phones.

AMD is looking at a revenue decline of 7.6% reports eWeek. Of the top ten suppliers of microprocessors, Sony posted the largest decline with 32.8% revenue decline for the year. Intel still has a massive lead in the computer CPU market with an 80.6% share.