If you just looked at the headline numbers in Intel's earnings releases for the past few quarters, you might be forgiven for not knowing that there's an economic slump still on. Beginning in January of this year, with the release of a stratospheric set of Q4 numbers for 2009 (an 875 percent year-over-year increase in net income, for instance), the chipmaker has more than just recovered the ground it lost in 2008—it has consistently set new records. All of this, despite the anemic, tentative nature of the global recovery so far.

How did it pull this off? Obviously, much of the success has been due to solid execution and old-fashioned luck, but it helped that the company was able to actually benefit from a handful of downturn-related factors.

1. Cloud computing is the new temp worker

Many of the gains in the past two earnings reports have come from Intel's datacenter division, where the ongoing cloud computing buildout is boosting the company's server revenues. One of the reasons that the cloud is on the rise is that it's a cheaper, lower-commitment alternative to buying your own in-house hardware. In a nutshell, the cloud is to the server room what the temp worker is the full-time employee, and Intel is now a major temp provider.

The cloud's easy-come, easy-go nature is a perfect fit for an extremely uncertain economic environment, where businesses are sitting on record levels of cash. When companies do spend money these days, they do so on stock buybacks—anything to keep from actually investing in new capacity (where's the demand?) or on hiring new workers. So the cloud's rental model beats the traditional server room's ownership model hands-down in this environment.

Sure, there are still plenty of barriers to cloud adoption and there are the ongoing concerns about reliability, lock-in, and so on. But all of those question marks hanging over the cloud represent a set of "known unknowns," to adopt Donald Rumsfeld's famous taxonomy of uncertainty. In contrast, the question marks hanging over the global macroeconomic picture include many "unknown unknowns," which, taken together, are a scarier set of unknowns than the cloud presents.

As long as economic uncertainty persists, the cloud will grow, and as long as the cloud grows, so will Intel. (At least, assuming they don't lose their cloud business to ARM, but we wouldn't seriously be talking about that possibility until late 2012 at the earliest.)

2. The Chinese stimulus

The most recent earnings report was the first since the Chinese unveiled their giant, telco-centered stimulus package that Intel did not credit the Chinese stimulus for goosing its sales. I've covered this China issue quite a bit in past earnings write-ups, so I won't dwell on it anymore;. indeed, it's a relief not to write about it anymore.

I include it here, though, because it has been a consistent factor in Intel's recent performance, and as such it represents another way that Intel has made lemonade out of economic lemons.

3. R&D, and the "last man standing" effect

In 2007, almost anyone with their ear to the ground knew that some sort of slowdown was coming, but most thought that they'd be among the few who could ride it out with a full product pipeline and emerge at the other end as one of the few in their space with new wares on offer. In other words, there would be a shakeout that would be good for the survivors, because competitors would be fewer and weaker after it was over.

But then, the waste really hit the rotating blades, and some of those who were planning to ride it out panicked and just started cutting off limbs for food. One of the themes in the semiconductor market was the R&D cutting that went on. Across the sector, companies cut R&D, sold off adjacent businesses, and just focused on staying in the black with existing products. If they survived, the thinking went, they could replace the lost R&D via acquisitions (anecdotally, I've heard that this scramble for early-stage technology acquisitions is already taking hold in semis).

In contrast to the rest of the industry, Intel kept its R&D budget flat throughout the downturn. It made some changes to the scope of the effort, like cutting more speculative projects and shifting that money to fewer, more commercial-friendly efforts ("more wood behind fewer arrows," as an Intel exec put it), but overall they continued to pursue new markets at a time when others were focused on just keeping what they had.

The chipmaker's commitment to R&D is already starting to pay off in consumer electronics and mobiles. The reason that Paul Otellini can talk about x86 tablets with some degree of credibility in the face of the ARM onslaught is that Intel didn't scale back its embedded ambitions at all. In fact, projects like Smart TV (which gave rise to Google TV) are almost certainly among the "fewer arrows" that Intel put more money into as a result of the downturn.

4. Emerging markets (and US stimulus?)

The one stimulus effort that Intel doesn't seem to have benefited from at first glance is Uncle Sam's. Otellini is happy to name-check the aforementioned Chinese stimulus in his earnings calls, but perhaps he should consider showing the US a little love.

There's a growing school of thought, most prominently given voice by Andy Xie and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, that much of the money the US has been printing and pumping into the economy has gone into emerging markets and is causing them to overheat. If Stiglitz and co. are correct, then when Intel cited strong demand from emerging markets as a major factor in its earnings growth (vs. weakness in North America and Europe), maybe it should have given a nod to the Fed's easy money policy.

But whatever's behind the pace of inflation in emerging markets, Intel has been aggressively pursuing those markets for a decade. So the company was very well positioned to catch the growth that's been happening there over the past few quarters. In this respect, as in the others discussed above, the chipmaker managed to make its own luck.