Intel Corporation

Tagline

What's Inside Has Never Mattered More.

Net Worth

$270,000,000,000

Started in (City)

California

Started in (Country)

United States

Incorporation Date

18th December, 1968

Bankruptcy Date

Founders

Gordon Moore
Robert Noyce

About

Intel Corporation is a multinational corporation, a leader in technology innovation, and a provider of semiconductor chips. Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue and is the developer of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue during nearly a decade, from 2007-2016 fiscal years. It has played a symbolic role in the global digital economy. The company’s name comes from ’Integrated Electronics’.

Beginning

Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, by American engineers Robert Noys and Gordon Moore. They were pioneers in semiconductors, with an initial investment of $2.5 million, the two wanted to name the company Moore Noys, but later settled for Intel. The scientists set themselves a definite goal, to create a practical and affordable semiconductor memory. The memory device in Silicon Valley costs at least a hundred times more than the time memory on a magnetic core. The cost of semiconductor memory reached one dollar per bit, while magnetic ones only cost a cent per bit. The scientists knew if they were to conquer the market, they only had to reduce the cost by a hundred times. In 1970, Intel released a 1 Kbit memory chip, exceeding the capacity of the existing chip. The microcircuit, known as Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), 1103, was cheaper and used less power than core memory; they quickly became the standard memory devices in computers worldwide. During this time, the Japanese company Busicom turned to Intel with a request to develop a chipset for a group of high-performance programmable calculators. The initial design of the calculator provided for at least 12 different types of chips. Ted Hoff, an Intel engineer rejected this concept and instead developed a single chip logical device that receives application commands from the semiconductor memory. The central processor worked under the control of the program which allowed adapting functions of the microcircuit for the performance of incoming tasks. The microcircuit was universal and not limited to a calculator. The logical modules had only one purpose and that was to strictly define a set of commands that were used to control its functions. This was a contract to the Japanese manufacturer, which let Intel retain all rights to the technology.

Road to Success

On November 15, 1971, the first 4-bit microprocessor set 4044 was launched. It carried out 60,000 operations per second and worked at a frequency of 108 kHz and was produced using 20-micron technology. Data was transmitted in blocks of 4 bits per clock, and the maximum addressable amount of memory was 640 bytes. The 4044 was used in traffic lights and even in the Pioneer 10 research rocket launched by NASA. In April 1972, Intel released the 8008 processor, which ran at 200kHz. The data bus was 8-bit, which allowed addressing 16 KB memory. It was intended to be used for terminals and programmable calculators. The next model, the 8080 was released in April 1974, it was the first general-purpose microprocessor. The processor contained 6000 transistors and could address 64 KB of memory. The first Altair 8800 was assembled on it. The computer used CPM operating system. Over time, the 8080 became so famous that it began to be copied. By the end of 1975, several former Intel engineers were developing the 8080 processor. The next year saw the company released the Z-80 a significantly improved version of the 8080. It operated at a frequency of 2.5 MHz and contained 8500 transistors and could address 64KB of memory. It combined many different functions including a memory interface and RAM upgrade circuit. This made it possible to develop cheaper and simpler computers. The processor included new commands and internal registers, so software developed for the Z-80 could be used with all versions of 8080. In 1993, Intel introduced the first Pentium processor whose performance increased fivefold, compared to that of the 486 families. It was the first chip for PCs to use parallel processing. It had 3.1 million transistors, twice the number of its predecessor. It resulted in the expansion of the PC market, the higher performance Pentium machines made it possible for consumers to use PCs for multimedia graphical applications that required more processing power.

Challenges

After 2000, growth in demand for high-end microprocessors slowed. Competitors, notably AMD (Intel's largest competitor in its primary x86 architecture market), garnered significant market share, initially in low-end and mid-range processors but ultimately across the product range, and Intel's dominant position in its core market was greatly reduced, mostly due to controversial Net Burst microarchitecture. In the early 2000s then-CEO, Craig Barrett attempted to diversify the company's business beyond semiconductors, but few of these activities were ultimately successful. Intel had also for a number of years been embroiled in litigation. US law did not initially recognize intellectual property rights related to microprocessor topology (circuit layouts), until the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, a law sought by Intel and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). During the late 1980s and 1990s (after this law was passed), Intel also sued companies that tried to develop competitor chips to the 80386 CPU. The lawsuits were noted to significantly burden the competition with legal bills, even if Intel lost the suits. Antitrust allegations had been simmering since the early 1990s and had been the cause of one lawsuit against Intel in 1991. In 2004 and 2005, AMD brought further claims against Intel related to unfair competition.

Failures

In April 2011, Intel began a pilot project with ZTE Corporation to produce smartphones using the Intel Atom processor for China's domestic market. In December 2011, Intel announced that it reorganized several of its business units into a new mobile and communications group that would be responsible for the company's smartphone, tablet, and wireless efforts. Intel planned to introduce Medfield – a processor for tablets and smartphones – to the market in 2012, as an effort to compete with ARM. As a 32-nanometer processor, Medfield is designed to be energy-efficient, which is one of the core features of ARM's chips. At the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) 2011 in San Francisco, Intel's partnership with Google was announced. In January 2012, Google announced Android 2.3, supporting Intel's Atom microprocessor. In 2013, Intel's Kirk Skaugen said that Intel's exclusive focus on Microsoft platforms was a thing of the past and that they would now support all "tier-one operating systems" such as Linux, Android, iOS, and Chrome. In 2014, Intel cut thousands of employees in response to "evolving market trends", and offered to subsidize manufacturers for the extra costs involved in using Intel chips in their tablets. In April 2016, Intel canceled the SoFIA platform and the Broxton Atom SoC for smartphones, effectively leaving the smartphone market.

Achievements

In 1971 Intel introduced the first microprocessor

Subsidies

Mobileye
Here (15%)
Intel Ireland

CEOs

Patrick P. Gelsinger