Definition: Intel

(Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA) The largest manufacturer of CPU chips for Windows PCs (see x86). Intel is also a major vendor in networking and communications products. Along with Microsoft's DOS and Windows, Intel's hardware enabled the personal computer industry to flourish.

Over the years, Intel also 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
Intel owned the x86 market since the first IBM PC in 1981; however, Intel's arch rival AMD also makes x86 chips that are increasingly found in desktop and laptop PCs. Although Apple used x86 CPUs starting in 2006, it switched to Apple-designed chips starting in 2020 (see Apple M series). See AMD.

In addition, RISC-based chips designed by ARM, Qualcomm and Apple outperform x86 in battery life by a large 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 slow.

Although Intel began building a new plant in Chandler, Arizona, in 2024, the company announced the layoff of thousands of employees throughout the country. The Ohio plant was postponed from 2025 to 2030 and the company took a downward trend. However, by late 2025, the new Chandler fab began producing state-of-the-art chips for AI (see Intel 18A). Also in 2025, the U.S. government took a 10% stake in the company, and as of May 2026, pundits claim that Intel is in the early stage of a turnaround. 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.)