Once again, its data center group was Intel’s only operating segment to report year-over-year revenue growth for the most recently finished quarter. The group’s third-quarter revenue was US$2.9bn – up 12% from Q3 2012 - according to results the company announced Tuesday.

With continuing decline in PC sales around the world and extremely tough competition in the mobile-device market from the likes of ARM Holdings, which licenses its low-power processor-core design to chip manufacturers like Qualcomm and Samsung, Intel’s dominance in the data center hardware space continues along a steady growth curve.

In addition to the bread-and-butter Xeon line of x86 server chips, the company has been actively trying to expand its role in other parts of the data center IT food chain. These are products like network switches, energy management, software-defined networking and, most recently, low-power microservers.

Intel is also working on some technologies that are esoteric today but may very well become commonplace in data centers of the future.

Its Rack Scale Architecture concept promises to enable data center managers to upgrade IT infrastructure one component at a time. Instead of ripping and replacing an entire server, RSA will enable you to upgrade just the CPU, or just the memory or network card.

The components would be installed in a rack that would provide them with shared power and cooling resources and interconnect them through silicon photonics.

But that’s in the future. Today, the company continues growing its data center segment revenue primarily through the sales of Xeon chips. During the third quarter, the company launched second-generation chips in the x86 line, revenue from which should be coming in faster than revenue from sales of the first-gen chips in the family, launched last year.

Jason Waxman, general manager of high density servers at Intel, told us at the company’s San Francisco conference in September that because the Xeon E5-2600 platform had been validated by companies already, take-up of the new Ivy Bridge-EP chips would be much quicker (read our full interview with Waxman in the upcoming issue of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS, out in early November).

One of the ways Intel is trying to grow its data center revenue beyond the sales it makes into the x86 server market is by developing a line of low-power server-on-chip (SoC) products based on Atom, its low-power chip originally developed for mobile devices. Intel hopes to carve out a portion of the energy-constrained data center market for Atom, just like SoCs based on the ARM architecture are finding their way into the space.

While Intel is the first to have brought a 64-bit low-power server SoC to market, competition in this space is fierce. Unlike the x86 space, where AMD is its only serious competitor, the so-called microserver market was quickly crowded by companies old and new. In addition to AMD, companies planning to have ARM SoCs for microservers on the market next year include Calxeda, Applied Micro and Texas Instruments, among others.

Networking is another way for Intel to grow its data center revenue, especially the trend of software defined networking.

In 2009, the company bought software developer Wind River. This September, the subsidiary launched the Open Network Software solution – an environment for building software-defined networks.

Intel’s other acquisition in the networking space was Fulcrum, a network silicon vendor. Intel’s recently released Seacliff Trail reference design for top-of-rack software-defined switch combines Fulcrum’s Alta switch with Wind River software.

To be sure, data centers are not the biggest of Intel business segments. Its PC Client Group brings in the biggest chunk of revenue by far, although the size of that revenue has been steadily declining.

For the third quarter, the PC Client group reported $8.4bn in sales – down 3.5% year over year. The bucket Intel calls “other” operating segments, which includes intelligent systems, mobile communications, notebooks, tablets, phones and products for service providers, generated $1.1bn in revenue – down 9.3% from the third quarter of 2012.

Revenue growth reported by the data center segment, however, appears to have been enough for the company to report an overall revenue increase year over year. Intel’s total Q3 revenue was $13.5bn – up 5% from the third quarter of last year.