Definition: Intel

(Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA) The largest manufacturer of CPU chips in Windows PCs. Intel is also a major vendor in networking and communications products. Along with Microsoft's DOS and Windows, Intel's hardware pioneered the PC and revolutionized the computer industry. Intel's x86 line of CPUs is the most widely used processor in Windows PCs, laptops and servers. See x86.

Over the years, Intel developed a variety of chips and board-level products, including the high-end Itanium CPUs, as well as the MULTIBUS for industrial applications. See Itanium, MULTIBUS and Tera-Scale.

The Static RAM Chip
Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove in Mountain View, California. A year later it introduced its first product, a 64-bit bipolar static RAM chip. Within a couple years, Intel's very successful memory chips began rendering magnetic core storage obsolete. For more than a decade, Intel led in dynamic RAM (DRAM) but began to exit the memory business in the mid-1980s when DRAM became a commodity product. Later on, the company offered an all-purpose non-volatile memory that combined RAM and storage (see 3D XPoint). See core storage.

Intel Invented the Microprocessor
In response to a calculator chip order from a Japanese manufacturer, Intel designed the first microprocessor in 1971, thereby spawning a revolution in desktop personal computing (see Intel 4004).

The 2020s Were Mixed
Although Intel owned the x86 market since the first IBM PC, AMD also makes x86-compatible chips and has been competition for decades. Although Mac computers used x86 CPUs starting in 2006, new Apple products use Apple's own designs (see Apple M series). See AMD.

In addition, RISC-based chips designed by ARM, Qualcomm and Apple outperform x86 in battery life by a huge margin and thoroughly dominate the mobile market. Intel's new venture into the foundry business whereby it offers to manufacture chips for other companies has been relatively slow.

Although Intel began building a new plant in Chandler, Arizona, in 2024, the company announced the layoff of 15,000 employees throughout the country. A year later, Intel stated that the first of two new fabs in Ohio will not go online until 2030. Takeover bids are rumored. Stay tuned! See ARM and RISC.

Intel Founders

The founders of Intel posing with a rubylith of the 8080 CPU in 1978. From left to right: Andy Grove, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. (Image courtesy of Intel Corporation.)

Inside the Plant

These pictures were taken inside Intel's semiconductor fabrication plants. Chip making is performed in clean rooms, where the air is exchanged seven times each minute and the workers wear "bunny suits" to keep themselves from contaminating the process. (Images courtesy of Intel Corporation.)