Intel | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Intel

Intel Corporation, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is the leading American manufacturer and supplier of microprocessors and integrated circuits. It also produces network and conferencing products, computer modules and boards, memory chips, servers, and parallel supercomputers. The company is most famous for pioneering the development of the microprocessor, which has made the personal computer possible. Currently, the majority of the world's personal computers uses Intel microprocessors. Intel has at various times had up to 95% of the personal computer chip market.

Intel was founded in 1968 when engineers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation of Mountain View, California, to form their own company. While working at Fairchild the pair had invented the integrated circuit, a critical component to the microprocessor. Their new company, called N M Electronics (after Noyce and Moore), was specifically formed to manufacture large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits. Andrew Grove joined Noyce and Moore, and soon the three men changed the company's name to Intel. The name is a contraction of "INTegrated ELectronics."

The LSIs that Intel began manufacturing late in 1968 were semiconductor memories, a device that would hold enough data to replace the magnetic core memories then used in computers. The company's first successful products were (a) the 1103, a 1 kilobyte dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip that in 1970 was the first integrated circuit with enough capacity to be used in mainframe computers, and (b) an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) in 1971.

In 1971 Intel developed the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Intel engineer Ted Hoff originated the idea for the 4004 while developing a series of 12 processing chips for the Japanese calculator manufacturer Busicom. Hoff's idea was to design a single-chip, general-purpose central processing unit (CPU) that could be programmed individually. The 4004 contained 2,300 transistors and had as much processing power as the 18,000 vacuum tubes contained within the entire ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), which was completed in 1945 and is usually considered the world's first large scale general-purpose computer. Chips like the 4004 quickly replaced magnetic core memories.

In 1972 the Intel 8008 microprocessor, so named because it was twice as powerful as the 4004, was introduced and used inside the Mark 8, the first microcomputer to be marketed. Two years later the Intel 8080 was used in such products as handheld calculators, cash registers, automatic teller machines, and traffic lights. It is considered the first general-purpose microprocessor, and was used inside what is recognized as the first commercially successful personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800. In 1980 IBM chose the Intel 8088-chip (introduced in 1978) for its first personal computer, the IBM PC. Because IBM's PC design was widely accepted, this partnership helped position Intel as the world's top microprocessor manufacturer. The 8088 chip and its successors became the standard for all personal computers. This critical sale moved Intel into the ranks of a Fortune 500 company, and Fortune magazine named Intel one of the "Business Triumphs of the Seventies".

In the following years Intel produced a series of faster, more powerful microprocessors that it generically called 80x86 ("eighty-eighty-six") microprocessors, where the letter "x" was specified with numerals as new chips were introduced. Important developments were the 16-bit 80286 chip (introduced in 1982 as the Intel 286), the 32-bit 80386 chip (introduced in 1985 as the Intel 386), the 80486 chip (introduced in 1989 as the Intel 486), and the Pentium processor (introduced in 1993). The Intel Pentium processor did not use the "80x86" designation because a United States court had ruled that a number could not be trademarked. The Intel Pentium processor contained about 3.2 million transistors and could execute more than 100 million instructions per second. Intel has continued to dominate the market for microprocessors with its Intel Pentium Pro chip (1995), Intel Pentium II (1997), and Intel Pentium III (1999). In 2000 Intel, still the largest manufacturer of microprocessors and integrated circuits in the world, introduced the Pentium IV processor.