Intel Corporation

American manufacturer of semiconductor computer circuits. Besides microprocessors, the company makes microcontrollers (single-chip computers), memory chips, computer modules and boards, network and conferencing products, and parallel supercomputers. Its headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.

The company was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who had invented the integrated circuit while working at Fairchild Semiconductor. They formed their own company, N M Electronics, in order to manufacture large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits. The two men were soon joined by Andrew Grove, and they changed the company's name to Intel (from “integrated electronics”).

The LSI circuits that Intel began making late in 1968 were semiconductor memories, which were then 10 times more expensive than magnetic core memories (the industry standard at the time). The company achieved its first breakthrough in 1970 with the 1103, a one-kilobyte dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that was the first chip with the capacity to store a significant amount of information. In 1971 Intel introduced the 4004, a chip containing 2,300 transistors that was the world's first microprocessor. (A microprocessor is a chip that contains all the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry necessary to perform as the central processing unit [CPU] of a computer.) With these products, Intel's semiconductor chips began to replace magnetic cores as the memories of computers.

Intel's 8080 (introduced 1974) was an eight-bit microprocessor—i.e., it processed information in groups of eight bits (binary digits) at a time. The world's first general-purpose microprocessor, the 8080 provided some of the first microcomputers used in cash registers, automatic teller machines, and a wide range of consumer products. IBM chose to use Intel's 8088 microprocessor (introduced 1978) in its first personal computer (PC), and because IBM's PC design was widely accepted, the 8088 and subsequent Intel microprocessors became a standard for all PC-type machines. In the following years Intel produced a series of faster, more powerful microprocessors. By the end of the 20th century Intel's top microprocessor, the Pentium 4, contained about 42 million transistors and a CPU that operated at up to 1.7 gigahertz. (Two arithmetic logic units each operated at double the CPU rate.) Although the company faced growing competition during the 1990s, its microprocessors were installed in more than 80 percent of new PCs.