Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is one of the world's largest and highest-valued semiconductor chip manufacturers, and is best known for developing the microprocessors found in most personal computers. Intel also produces motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, graphics processing units, and other components used in computing and communications.
Founded on July 18, 1968, by pioneers Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andy Grove, Intel played a central role in the rise of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The company's name is a portmanteau of "integrated" and "electronics". Intel introduced the world's first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971, and later the x86 architecture with the Intel 8086 in 1978, which became the dominant instruction set architecture in personal computers.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Intel expanded into server processors, solid-state drives, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In 2021, the company announced a major foundry service to manufacture chips for other companies, competing with TSMC and Samsung. Intel has faced increased competition in recent years from AMD in the CPU market and from ARM architecture-based designs in mobile and server segments.
History
Intel was founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore (of Moore's law fame) and Robert Noyce, a co-inventor of the integrated circuit. The company's first product was the 3101 Schottky TTL bipolar memory, but its breakthrough came with the Intel 4004 microprocessor, developed for a Japanese calculator company. In the 1980s, IBM chose Intel's 8088 processor for the IBM Personal Computer, cementing Intel's place in the PC industry.
Throughout the 1990s, Intel introduced the Pentium brand and became the dominant supplier of CPUs for Windows-based PCs. The company also developed the Xeon line for servers and workstations. In 2005, Intel launched the Core microarchitecture, which succeeded the NetBurst architecture. More recent milestones include the introduction of Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost, and integrated graphics.
In 2022, Intel broke ground on new fabrication facilities in Ohio, part of a multi‑billion‑dollar investment to expand its manufacturing capacity in the United States and Europe.
Products and technologies
Intel's product lines include:
- Intel Core (i3, i5, i7, i9) – consumer desktop and laptop processors
- Intel Xeon – server and workstation processors
- Intel Atom – low-power processors for mobile devices and embedded systems
- Intel Arc – discrete graphics processing units (GPUs)
- Intel Optane – high-speed memory and storage technology
Intel is also a leading vendor of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) through its acquisition of Altera in 2015, and of artificial intelligence accelerators (Intel Nervana and Intel Gaudi).