The world is waiting for Intel to announce if it is out of its slump tomorrow, and no one is holding their breath for good news. Intel supplies chips for about four out of every five PC processors and the downturn in the economy has hurt its sales. The company has tried to offset that decline with higher sales of chips for severs, phones and tablets.

A pair of research firms believe that PC sales continued to sink during the holiday shopping season, capping the steepest annual decline in PC shipments in decades. According to Gartner, worldwide PC sales fell 7 percent during the fourth quarter, marking the seventh-straight quarter of declines, while International Data Corp. said global PC shipments fell 6 percent.

Analysts, on average, expect a profit of 52 cents per share, according to a survey by FactSet. When it released its third-quarter results in October, Santa Clara-based Intel projected fourth-quarter revenue of $13.2 billion to $14.2 billion. Analysts expect $13.72 billion.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, Intel posted a profit of 48 cents per share on $13.5 billion in revenue.