The pace of those improvements has slowed, but International Business Machines Corp on Thursday said that silicon has at least one more generational advance in store.
The technology IBM showed Thursday is the most basic building block of a chip: a transistor, which acts like an electrical on-off switch to form the 1s and 0s of binary digits at that foundation of all modern computing.
That compares with 20pc market share in the same quarter a year ago and 16pc market share in the previous quarter when arch-rival Apple Inc released the iPhone 12.
The world's biggest memory chip and smartphone maker reported operating profit of 9.05 trillion won ($8.17 billion). It also said revenue rose 3% to 61.6 trillion won, also meeting estimates.
Samsung's fourth-quarter operating profit rose to 9.05 trillion won ($8.17 billion), from 7.2 trillion won a year earlier, in line with the company's estimate earlier this month.
Foreigners were net sellers of 74.1 billion won ($68.24 million) worth of shares on the main board, while retail investors purchased net 161.6 billion won.