While Intel’s overall full-year revenue for 2012 was down compared to 2011, Intel’s data center group was the only division within the company whose revenue grew last year.

Intel reported full-year revenue of US$53.3bn and net income of $11bn, or $2.13 earnings per share. For the year’s fourth quarter, the company reported about $13.5bn in revenue and net income of $2.5bn.

Revenue was down 1.2% from 2011, net income was down 15%, and earnings per share were down 11%.

The biggest chunk of total revenue still comes from the company’s PC Client group, contributing $34.3bn in 2012, that number is down 3% from what it was in 2011. Intel has an “other architecture” group, whose revenue of $4.4bn was a 13% drop year over year.

The Data Center Group’s full-year revenue was $10.7bn, or 6% up from the previous year, the company said.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini, commenting on the results, said, We made tremendous progress across the business in 2012 as we entered the market for smartphones and tablets, worked with our partners to reinvent the PC, and drove continued innovation and growth in the data center. As we enter 2013, our strong product pipeline has us well positioned to bring a new wave of Intel innovations across the spectrum of computing.”

Intel’s entry into the mobile market came early in the year, when it announced smartphones by Lenovo and Motorolla with Intel’s Atom processors inside. The company’s biggest competitor in this space is UK-based ARM Holdings, whose low-power chips are inside most of the world’s smart phones and tablets.

Mobile is not the only space where Intel is competing with ARM, a company that licenses its processor designs to others, who design platforms around the architecture. Some of these licensees are also making ARM-based Server-on-Chip (SoC) cards and sell them to server manufacturers.

Data center systems constitute the smallest part of the world’s total IT spend, according to Gartner. In 2012, individuals and organizations spent US$3.58 trillion on IT, a figure that in addition to data center servers, storage and networking gear, includes devices, enterprise software, IT services and telecom services.

About $141bn of that was spent on data center systems, compared to $627bn on devices, $278bn on enterprise software, $881bn on IT services and $1.66 trillion on telecom services.

Intel announced in November that Otellini was planning to retire this May after about 40 years with the company, seven of them as CEO. At a conference in December, he said he expected his replacement to come from within the company, according to a Reuters report.