INTEL HISTORY
Intel Corporation is an American global technology company and the
world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series
of microprocessors,
the processors found in most personal computers. Intel was founded on July
18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation (though
a common misconception is that "Intel" is from the word intelligence) and is based in Santa Clara, California, USA. Intel
also makes motherboard chipsets, network interface controllersand integrated circuits, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded
processors and other
devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor
pioneers Robert Noyce andGordon Moore and widely associated with the
executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel
combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing
capability. Though Intel was originally known primarily to engineers and
technologists, its "Intel Inside" advertising campaign of the 1990s
made it and its Pentium processor
household names.
Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory
chips, and this represented the majority of its business until 1981. While
Intel created the first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not
until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested
heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During
this period Intel became the dominant supplier
of microprocessors for PCs, and was known for aggressive and sometimes
controversial tactics in defence of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the
direction of the PC industry. The
2010 rankings of the world's 100 most powerful brands published by Millward
Brown Optimor showed the company's brand value at number 48.
Intel has also begun research in electrical transmission and
generation.
Origins
Intel was founded in Mountain View, California in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore (of
"Moore's Law" fame, a chemist and physicist)
and Robert
Noyce (a physicist and
co-inventor of the integrated
circuit) when they left Fairchild Semiconductor. Intel's third employee was Andy Grove, a chemical
engineer, who ran the company through much of the 1980s and the
high-growth 1990s.
Moore and Noyce initially wanted to name the company "Moore
Noyce". The name, however,
was a homophone for
"more noise" — an ill-suited name for an electronics company, since noise in electronics is usually very undesirable and
typically associated with bad interference.
They used the name NM
Electronics for almost a
year, before deciding to call their company Integrated Electronics or
"Intel" for short. Since
"Intel" was already trademarked by a hotel chain, they had to buy the rights for
the name.
Early history
At its founding, Intel was distinguished by its ability to make semiconductors, and its primary products were static random access memory (SRAM) chips. Intel's business grew
during the 1970s as it expanded and improved its manufacturing processes and
produced a wider range of products, still
dominated by various memory devices.
While Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor (Intel 4004) in 1971 and one of the first microcomputers in
1972,[14][15] by
the early 1980s its business was dominated by dynamic random access
memory chips. However,
increased competition from Japanese semiconductor manufacturers had, by 1983,
dramatically reduced the profitability of this market, and the sudden success
of the IBM personal
computer convinced
then-CEO Grove to
shift the company's focus to microprocessors, and to change fundamental aspects
of that business model.
By the end of the 1980s this decision had proven successful.
Buoyed by its fortuitous position as microprocessor supplier to IBM and its competitors within the rapidly growing personal computer market, Intel
embarked on a 10-year period of unprecedented growth as the primary (and most
profitable) hardware supplier to the PC industry. By the end of the 1990s, its
line of Pentium processors
had become a household name.
Slowing demand and challenges to
dominance
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. 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).[17] 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
that had been simmering since the early 1990s and already been the cause of one lawsuit against Intel in 1991, broke out again
as AMD brought further
claims against Intel
related to unfair
competition in 2004,
and again in 2005.
In 2005, CEO Paul
Otellini reorganized
the company to refocus its core processor and chipset business on platforms
(enterprise, digital home, digital health, and mobility) which led to the
hiring of over 20,000 new employees. In
September 2006 due to falling profits, the company announced a restructuring
that resulted in layoffs of 10,500 employees or about 10 percent of its
workforce by July 2006.
Regaining of momentum
Faced with the need to regain lost marketplace momentum, Intel unveiled its new product development
model to regain its prior technological lead. Known as its "tick-tock model", the program was based
upon annual alternation ofmicroarchitecture innovation and process innovation.
In 2006, Intel produced P6 and NetBurst products with reduced die size (65 nm).
A year later it unveiled its Core
microarchitecture to
widespread critical acclaim; the
product range was perceived as an exceptional leap in processor performance
that at a stroke regained much of its leadership of the field. In 2008, we saw another "tick",
Intel introduced the Penryn microarchitecture, undergoing a shrink from
65 nm to 45 nm, and the year after saw the release of its positively
reviewed successor processor, Nehalem,
followed by another silicon shrink to the 32nm process.
Intel was not the first microprocessor corporation to do this. For
example, around 1996 graphics chip designers nVidia had addressed its own business and marketplace
difficulties by adopting a demanding 6-month internal product cyclewhose products repeatedly
outperformed market expectation.
Sale of XScale processor business
On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell
the XScale processor business to Marvell Technology Group for an estimated $600 million (They bought
them for $1.6billion) in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities.
The move was intended to permit Intel to focus its resources on its core x86
and server businesses, and the acquisition completed on November 9, 2006.
Acquisitions
In August 2010, Intel announced two major acquisitions. On 19
August, Intel announced that it planned to purchase McAfee, a manufacturer of computer security
technology. The purchase price was $7.68 billion, and the companies said that
if the deal were approved, new products would be released early in 2011.
Less than two weeks later, the company announced the acquisition
of Infineon Technologies’ Wireless Solutions
business. With the
Infineon transaction, Intel plans to use the company’s technology in laptops,
smart phones, netbooks, tablets and embedded computers in consumer products,
eventually integrating its wireless modem into Intel’s silicon chips. Intel won the European Union regulatory
approval for its acquisition of McAfee on 26 January 2011. Intel agreed to
ensure that rival security firms have access to all necessary information that
would allow their products to use Intel's chips and personal computers.
Following the closure of the McAfee deal, Intel's workforce totals
approximately 90,000, including (roughly) 12,000 software engineers.
In March of 2011, Intel bought most of the assets of Cairo-based
SySDSoft.
Expansions
February 2011: The company will build a new microprocessor factory
at Chandler, Arizona which is expected to be completed in 2013 at
a cost of $5 billion. It will accommodate 4,000 employees. The company produces
three quarters of their products in the United States, although three quarters
of the revenue come from overseas.
Product and market history
SRAMS and the microprocessor
The company's first products were shift
register memory and
random-access memory integrated
circuits, and Intel grew to be a leader in the fiercely competitive DRAM, SRAM, and ROM markets
throughout the 1970s. Concurrently, Intel engineers Marcian
Hoff, Federico
Faggin, Stanley
Mazor and Masatoshi
Shima invented Intel's
first microprocessor.
Originally developed for the Japanese company Busicom to replace a number of ASICs in a calculator already produced by
Busicom, the Intel
4004 was introduced to
the mass market on November 15, 1971, though the microprocessor did not become
the core of Intel's business until the mid-1980s. (Note: Intel is usually given
credit with Texas
Instruments for the
almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor.)
From DRAM to microprocessors
In 1983, at the dawn of the personal
computer era, Intel's profits
came under increased pressure from Japanese memory-chip manufacturers, and
then-President Andy Grove drove the company into a focus on microprocessors.
Grove described this transition in the book Only the Paranoid Survive.
A key element of his plan was the notion, then considered radical, of becoming
the single source for successors to the popular 8086 microprocessor.
Until then, manufacture of complex integrated circuits was not
reliable enough for customers to depend on a single supplier, but Grove began
producing processors in three geographically distinct factories, and ceased
licensing the chip designs to competitors such as Zilog and AMD.
When the PC industry boomed in the late 1980s and 1990s, Intel was one of the
primary beneficiaries.
Intel, x86 processors, and the
IBM PC
Despite the ultimate importance of the microprocessor, the 4004 and
its successors the 8008 and
the 8080 were
never major revenue contributors at Intel. As the next processor, the 8086 (and
its variant the 8088) was completed in 1978, Intel embarked on a major
marketing and sales campaign for that chip nicknamed "Operation
Crush", and intended to win as many customers for the processor as
possible. One design win was the newly created IBM PC division,
though the importance of this was not fully realized at the time.
IBM introduced its personal computer in
1981, and it was rapidly successful. In 1982, Intel created the 80286 microprocessor, which, two years
later, was used in the IBM PC/AT. Compaq,
the first IBM PC "clone" manufacturer, produced a desktop system
based on the faster 80286 processor in 1985 and in 1986 quickly
followed with the first 80386-based
system, beating IBM and establishing a competitive market for PC-compatible
systems and setting up Intel as a key component supplier.
In 1975 the company had started a project to develop a highly
advanced 32-bit microprocessor, finally released in 1981 as the Intel
iAPX 432. The project was too ambitious and the processor was never
able to meet its performance objectives, and it failed in the marketplace.
Intel extended the x86
architecture to 32
bits instead.
386 microprocessor
During this period Andrew
Grove dramatically
redirected the company, closing much of its DRAM business and directing resources to the microprocessor business. Of perhaps greater
importance was his decision to "single-source" the 386
microprocessor. Prior to this, microprocessor manufacturing was in its infancy,
and manufacturing problems frequently reduced or stopped production,
interrupting supplies to customers. To mitigate this risk, these customers
typically insisted that multiple manufacturers produce chips they could use to
ensure a consistent supply. The 8080 and 8086-series microprocessors were
produced by several companies, notably AMD.
Grove made the decision not to license the 386 design to other manufacturers,
instead producing it in three geographically distinct factories in Santa Clara, California; Hillsboro, Oregon;
and the Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Chandler; and convincing customers that this would
ensure consistent delivery. As the success of Compaq's Deskpro 386 established
the 386 as the dominant CPU choice, Intel achieved a position of near-exclusive
dominance as its supplier. Profits from this funded rapid development of both
higher-performance chip designs and higher-performance manufacturing
capabilities, propelling Intel to a position of unquestioned leadership by the
early 1990s.
486, Pentium, and Itanium
Intel introduced the 486 microprocessor
in 1989, and in 1990 formally established a second design team, designing the
processors code-named "P5" and "P6" in parallel and
committing to a major new processor every two years, versus the four or more
years such designs had previously taken. The P5 was earlier known as
"Operation Bicycle" referring to the cycles of the processor. The P5 was introduced in 1993 as the Intel Pentium, substituting a registered trademark name for
the former part number (numbers, such as 486, are hard to register as a
trademark). The P6 followed in 1995 as the Pentium
Pro and improved into
the Pentium
II in 1997. New
architectures were developed alternately in Santa Clara, California and Hillsboro,
Oregon.
The Santa Clara design team embarked in 1993 on a successor to the x86
architecture, codenamed "P7". The first attempt was
dropped a year later, but quickly revived in a cooperative program with Hewlett-Packard engineers, though Intel soon took over
primary design responsibility. The resulting implementation of the IA-64 64-bit
architecture was the Itanium,
finally introduced in June 2001. The Itanium's performance running legacy x86
code did not achieve expectations, and it failed to compete effectively with
64-bit extensions to the original x86 architecture, introduced by AMD,
named x86-64 (although Intel uses the name Intel 64, previously EM64T). As of 2009, Intel
continues to develop and deploy the Itanium.
The Hillsboro team designed the Willamette processors
(code-named P67 and P68) which were marketed as the Pentium 4.
Pentium flaw
In June 1994, Intel engineers discovered a flaw in the floating-point math
subsection of the P5 Pentium microprocessor.
Under certain data dependent conditions, low order bits of the result of
floating-point division operations would be incorrect, an error that can
quickly compound in floating-point operations to much larger errors in
subsequent calculations. Intel corrected the error in a future chip revision,
but nonetheless declined to disclose it.
In October 1994, Dr. Thomas Nicely, Professor of Mathematics at Lynchburg
College independently
discovered the bug, and upon receiving no response from his inquiry
to Intel, on October 30 posted a message on the Internet. Word of the bug spread quickly on the Internet and then to the industry press.
Because the bug was easy to replicate by an average user (there was a sequence
of numbers one could enter into the OS calculator to show the error), Intel's
statements that it was minor and "not even an erratum" were not
accepted by many computer users. During Thanksgiving 1994, The New
York Times ran a piece
by journalist John
Markoff spotlighting
the error. Intel changed its position and offered to replace every chip,
quickly putting in place a large end-user support organization.
This resulted in a $500 million charge against Intel's 1994 revenue.
Ironically, the "Pentium flaw" incident, Intel's
response to it, and the surrounding media coverage propelled Intel from being a
technology supplier generally unknown to most computer users to a household
name. Dovetailing with an uptick in the "Intel Inside" campaign, the episode is
considered to have been a positive event for Intel, changing some of its
business practices to be more end-user focused and generating substantial
public awareness, while avoiding a lasting negative impression.
"Intel Inside" and
other 1990s programs
During this period, Intel undertook two major supporting programs.
The first is widely known: the 1991 "Intel Inside" marketing and
branding campaign. The idea of ingredient branding was new at the time with
only Nutrasweet and
a few others making attempts at that. This
campaign established Intel, which had been a component supplier little-known
outside the PC industry,
as a household name.
The second program is little-known: Intel's Systems Group began,
in the early 1990s, manufacturing PC "motherboards", the main board component of a
personal computer, and the one into which the processor (CPU) and memory (RAM)
chips are plugged. Shortly after,
Intel began manufacturing fully configured "white box" systems for
the dozens of PC clone companies that rapidly sprang up. At its peak in the mid-1990s, Intel
manufactured over 15% of all PCs, making it the third-largest supplier at the
time.
During the 1990s, Intel's Architecture Lab (IAL) was responsible for many of the
hardware innovations of the personal computer, including the PCI Bus, the PCI
Express (PCIe) bus,
the Universal Serial Bus (USB), Bluetooth wireless interconnect, and the
now-dominant architecture for
multiprocessor servers. IAL's
software efforts met with a more mixed fate; its video and graphics software
was important in the development of software digital video, but later its efforts were largely
overshadowed by competition from Microsoft.
The competition between Intel and Microsoft was revealed in testimony by IAL
Vice-President Steven
McGeady at the Microsoft antitrust trial.
In March 2011, Intel has announced their SSD 510 with 120GB and
250GB capacities and read speeds of more than 500MBps. One drawback is that the
SSD 510 requires a SATA 6 GBps port in conjunction with the second generation
of Intel Core Series processor. Furthermore it still sells only in packs of
1000s which are difficult to acquire for the average consumer.
Supercomputers
The Intel Scientific Computers division was founded in 1984 by Justin
Rattner, in order to design and produce parallel computers based on Intel microprocessors
connected in hypercube topologies. In 1992 the name was
changed to the Intel Supercomputing Systems Division, and development of the iWarp architecture was also subsumed. The division designed several supercomputer systems, including the Intel
iPSC/1, iPSC/2, iPSC/860, Paragon and ASCI Red.
Competition, antitrust and
espionage
Two factors combined to end this dominance: the slowing of PC demand
growth beginning in 2000 and the rise of the low cost PC. By the end of the
1990s, microprocessor performance had outstripped software
demand for that CPU power. Aside from high-end server systems and software,
demand for which dropped with the end of the "dot-com
bubble", consumer systems ran effectively on increasingly
low-cost systems after 2000. Intel's strategy of producing ever-more-powerful
processors and obsoleting their predecessors stumbled, leaving an opportunity for rapid gains
by competitors, notably AMD. This in turn lowered the profitability of the processor line and ended an era
of unprecedented dominance of the PC hardware by Intel.
Intel's dominance in the x86 microprocessor market led to numerous
charges of antitrust violations
over the years, including FTC investigations in both the late 1980s
and in 1999, and civil actions such as the 1997 suit by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and a patent suit by Intergraph.
Intel's market dominance (at one time it
controlled over 85% of the market for 32-bit x86 microprocessors) combined with Intel's
own hardball legal tactics (such as its infamous 338 patent suit versus PC
manufacturers) made it an
attractive target for litigation, but few of the lawsuits ever amounted to
anything.
A case of industrial espionage arose in 1995 that involved both Intel
and AMD. Bill
Gaede, an Argentine formerly
employed both at AMD and at Intel's Arizona plant,
was arrested for attempting in 1993 to sell the i486 and P5 Pentium designs
to AMD and to certain foreign powers. Gaede
videotaped data from his computer screen at Intel and mailed it to AMD, which
immediately alerted Intel and authorities, resulting in Gaede's arrest. Gaede
was convicted and sentenced to 33 months in prison in June 1996.
Partnership with Apple
On June 6, 2005, Apple CEO Steve
Jobs announced that
Apple would be transitioning from its long favored PowerPC architecture to the Intel x86
architecture, because the future PowerPC road map was unable to
satisfy Apple's needs. The first Macintosh computers containing Intel CPUs were
announced on January 10, 2006, and Apple had its entire line of consumer Macs
running on Intel processors by early August 2006. The Apple Xserve server was
updated to Intel Xeonprocessors
from November 2006, and was offered in a configuration similar to Apple's Mac
Pro.
Core 2 Duo advertisement
controversy
In 2007, the company released a print advertisement for its Core 2 Duo
processor featuring six African American runners appearing to bow down to a
Caucasian male inside of an office setting (due to the posture taken by runners
on starting
blocks). According to Nancy Bhagat, Vice President of Intel
Corporate Marketing, the general public found the ad to be "insensitive
and insulting." The campaign
was quickly pulled and several Intel executives made public apologies on the
corporate website.
Classmate PC
Intel's Classmate
PC is the company's
first low-cost netbook computer.
In September 2006, Intel had nearly 100,000 employees and 200
facilities world wide. Its 2005 revenues were $38.8 billion and its Fortune
500 ranking was 49th.
Its stock symbol is INTC, listed on the NASDAQ.
As of February 2009 the biggest customers of Intel are Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Leadership and corporate
structure
Robert Noyce was
Intel's CEO at its founding in 1968, followed by
co-founder Gordon
Moore in 1975. Andy Grove became
the company's President in 1979 and added the CEO title in
1987 when Moore became Chairman. In 1998 Grove succeeded Moore as Chairman,
and Craig
Barrett, already company president,
took over. On May 18, 2005, Barrett handed the reins of the company over to Paul
Otellini, who previously was the company president and was
responsible for Intel's design win in the original IBM PC. The board of
directors elected
Otellini CEO, and Barrett replaced Grove as Chairman of the Board.
Grove stepped down as Chairman, but is retained as a special adviser. In May
2009, Barrett stepped down as chairman and Jane Shaw was elected as the new
Chairman of the Board.
Current members of the board of
directors of Intel are
Craig Barrett, Charlene
Barshefsky, Susan
Decker, James Guzy, Reed
Hundt, Paul Otellini, James Plummer, David Pottruck, Jane Shaw, John
Thornton, and David Yoffie.