Chipmaker giant Intel Corp. on Thursday reported that its fourth-quarter revenue increased by 8 percent year-over-year and annual revenue rose 24 percent, saying that 2010 was the best year in the company's history.

For the fourth quarter, the world's largest chipmaker posted revenue of 11.5 billion U.S. dollars and net income of 3.4 billion dollars, up 8 percent and 48 percent respectively compared with the same period of 2009.

Intel's full-year net income for 2010 was 11.7 billion dollars on revenue of 43.6 billion dollars, increasing by 167 percent and 24 percent respectively over the previous year.

"2010 was the best year in Intel's history. We believe that 2011 will be even better," Paul Otellini, the company's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Intel's financial report beat analysts'projections as its fourth-quarter revenue was expected to be 11.4 billion dollars.

Despite the record results, analysts said that Intel is still under pressure to shift from its traditional PC chips to lower-power chips with higher graphical performance, in the face of the challenges of smartphones and tablet computers.

As a sign of Intel's shift, the company on Monday announced that it will pay graphics card developer Nvidia 1.5 billion dollars to get the latter's patent on graphics processing.