History of Intel

History of Intel

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Intel is one of the worlds largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers.

Intel was originally founded in Mountain View, California in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore (of "Moore's Law" fame), a chemist, and Robert Noyce, a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Arthur Rock (investor and venture capitalist) helped them find investors, while Max Palevsky was on the board from an early stage. Moore and Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel. Rock was not an employee, but he was an investor and was chairman of the board. 

The total initial investment in Intel was $2.5 million convertible debentures and $10,000 from Rock. Just 2 years later, Intel completed their initial public offering (IPO), raising $6.8 million ($23.50 per share).Intel's third employee was Andy Grove, a chemical engineer, who later ran the company through much of the 1980s and the high-growth 1990s.

In deciding on a name, Moore and Noyce quickly rejected "Moore Noyce", 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. Instead they used the name NM Electronics before renaming their company Integrated Electronics or "Intel" for short. Since "Intel" was already trademarked by the hotel chain Intelco, they had to buy the rights for the name.

Product and market historySRAMS and the microprocessor:

Intel'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.

Intel, x86 processors:

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.

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. 

Engineers Vinod Dham and Rajeev Chandrasekhar were key figures on the core team that invented the 486 chip and later, Intel's signature Pentium chip. 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 meet expectations, and it failed to compete effectively with x86-64, which was AMD's 64-bit extensions to the original x86 architecture (Intel uses the name Intel 64, previously EM64T). As of 2012, Intel continues to develop and deploy the Itanium; known planning continues into 2014.

The Hillsboro team designed the Willamette processors (initially code-named P68), which were marketed as the Pentium 4.

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