In a report issued earlier this week, market research firm IDC said it expects worldwide IT spending to grow by 3 percent in 2010, fueled in large part by emerging markets like China and India.

"Despite pent-up demand for upgrades and new applications following the deep spending cuts of the past year, economic uncertainty will combine with capital and credit constraints to inhibit spending in mature economies," IDC analyst Stephen Minton said.

IDC predicts global IT spending will hit $1.48 trillion by the end of the year, which is a good chunk less than what Gartner is expecting. According to Gartner, spending will grow by 4.6 percent, to $3.4 trillion.

Don't believe all the gloom and doom scenarios you might be hearing about the PC market. According to market research firm IDC, global PC processor shipments in the fourth quarter of 2009 hit an all-time high, rising 31.3 percent. And just in time too, as full year growth for PC processors was a bit more modest, jumping 2.5 percent while revenues dropped 7.1 percent to $28.6 billion, IDC says.

"Compared to the third quarter of 2009, the modest rise in shipments in the fourth quarter of 2009 indicates that the market is returning to normal seasonal patterns," said Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC. "Compared to the fourth quarter of 2008, the huge rise in shipments indicates that the market has put the recession behind it. Both comparisons indicate that the PC industry anticipates improvement in PC end demand in 2010."

The growth wasn't relegated to mostly mobile chips, either. While mobile processors enjoyed an increase of 11.7 percent, x86 server processors grew by 14.1 percent on the quarter, while desktop chips grew by 4.8 percent.

Interestingly, AMD gained a bit of ground on its rival Intel. Intel's overall PC processor shipment market share declined slightly from 80.3 percent in 2008 to 79.7 percent in 2009, while AMD went up almost a full percentage point from 19.2 percent to 20.1 percent.