MICROPROCESSORÂ
JANUARY 21, 2022
22 Important Facts About Intel Company You Should Know
22 important facts about Intel company you should know as they are the largest manufacturers of microprocessors in the world today.
- Intel was founded in Mountain View, California, on July 18, 1968 by Gordon Earle Moore and Robert Norton Noyce.
- Moore (known for Moore’s law) is a businessman, engineer and a chemist while Noyce was an American physicist and entrepreneur.
- At the time both Moore and Noyce were already Silicon Valley Legends when they founded Intel.
- Originally the company was called “NM Electronics” for Noyce and Moore. They purchased the rights to use the name “Intel” from a company called Intelco.
- The name Intel is also the term from intelligence information which makes it appropriate for the company business.
- Intel was a major player in the rise of the Silicon Valley as a high technology center development.
- Intel is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue and is the developer of the x86 series microprocessors found in most PC (Personal Computer).
- Since its founding in 1968, the company has been an integrated device manufacturer or IDM, meaning they both designs, builds and sells its own semiconductor chips.
- Intel was also and early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips until 1981.
- The first commercial microprocessor chip (Intel 4004) was created by Intel in 1971 and became their primary business when PC became a great thing in 1980’s.
- The first Intel 4004 microprocessor was produced on two-inch wafers compared to the 12-inch wafers used commonly today.
- Intel 4004 was designed by Federico Faggin using silicon gate technology with 2.300 transistors.
- Before Intel 4004 processors were made from discrete transistors and required several modules connected to each other using a backplane.
- Currently Intel factories produce over 5 billion transistors in every second.
- Dell and Hewlett Packard are the biggest customers for Intel for decades. Last year HP overtakes Dell as Intel’s largest customer.
- The only major competitor for Intel in the x86 processor market is AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) other small competitors are VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated System and Nvidia.
- In 1991, Intel launched the marketing campaign “Intel Inside” and was able to associate brand loyalty with consumer selection.
- By the end of 1990’s Intel Pentium processors line had became a household name.
- In January 2022, Intel chose Licking County, Ohio as the site for a primary new manufacturing facility with $100 billion is potentially to be invested.
- Due to the under pressure profit from Japanese memory chip manufacturers, in 1983, Intel CEO Andy Grove, focused the company on microprocessors. By doing this, Intel became one of the primary players when the PC industry boomed in the late 1980s and 1990s.
- During the 1990’s Intel was responsible for the hardware innovations for PC such as PCI Bus, PCI Express (PCIe) bus and Universal Serial Bus (USB). Which becoming standard for modern PC components today.
- At its peak in the mid 1990s, Intel manufactured over 15% of all PCs in the world.
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