Well the economy is starting to come back a bit in America and some other countries, though it's not as robust as it was before the crash. IDC has released the latest numbers for the CPU market for Q3 2009. According to the company CPU shipments grew by 23% over the quarter

That amount of improvement is about double the normal growth rate reports IDC. The revenue for the CPU market over the quarter totaled $7.4 billion. The category was pushed by very robust growth in the netbook market with an increase in shipments for processors like Intel's Atom line of 35.7%.

The desktop CPU market grew 11.4% compared to Q2 2009 and the x86 server market grew 12.2% from Q2. The overall leader in the CPU market by a huge margin is Intel with 81.1% of the market. AMD is second with 18.7% of the market and VIA has a miniscule 0.2% of the market.