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Intel Corporation: Facts About the Leading Brand in Microprocessors Considered the world's largest semiconductor chip maker based on revenue, Intel Corporation was founded way back 18 July 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation and is based in Santa Clara , California, USA. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce originally wanted their company to be named Moore Noyce but being a homophone, sounding similar to "more noise" they resorted to call the company NM Electronics for almost a year until deciding to settle for Integrated Electronics. Intel by then was already patented as a trademark for a hotel chain so they were confined to buy the rights for the name before they have fully switched the name to Intel for short. Contrary to most speculations, Intel wasn't taken from the word "intelligence" but actually the merging of the starting letters of the original company name, Integrated Electronics Corporation which gave rise to Intel Corporation. 1. Intel's primary products at the very start were static random access memory (SRAM) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips and its initial manufacturing capability was mainly recognized in semiconductors.
2. Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima invented the first microprocessor which became the basis for the first commercial microprocessor in 1971.
3. Labelled the "Intel 4004" it was a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) , the first CPU in a single chip with a maximum clock speed of 740 kHz and an instruction cycle of 92.6 kHz.
4. Microprocessors did not became Intel's central focus product until the mid 80's when the need for it was called for by the advancing use of personal computers.
5. Intel's second stage of introducing another trend in the microprocessor manufacturing industry happened in 1981 with the release of its first highly advanced 32-bit microprocessor, the Intel iAPX 432.
6. Intel iAPX 432 was an advanced 32-bit microprocessor design which was started as a project under development by the company back in 1975 but later was not able to meet its expected performance and failed in the market. This has driven Intel to switch its x86 architecture based on 62-bit to 32 bit instead.
7. Intel 80386 or i386 became a timely product change resulting from the failure of the Intel iAPX 432, this 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985 has a maximum clock speed at 12 to 40 MHz and became the basis for the personal computer dominance of Compaq which was the first personal computer manufacturer to make use of this microprocessor.
8. Intel has proceeded with another breakthrough by introducing the 486 in 1989. Take note that Andrew Grove, then at Intel's helm already closed much of the company's DRAM business to focus on microprocessors at the start of the 80's thus continuing a faster pace for the company's priority projects focused on microprocessors.
Intel Pentium Family
9. In 1990, Intel went ahead with developments and started another processor design code named P5 and P6 making an active move of committing to a new processor every two years. Earlier known as the "Operation Bicycle" a catchword for the cycles of the processor, the P5 was introduced in 1983 as the "Intel Pentium" which became the basis for the evolution of the Pentium family of processors.
10. The "Intel Pentium" line of processors actually replaced the company's existing process of naming processors by part numbers with a registered trademark name.
11. Year 2005 marked another promising marketing lead when Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in 6 June that it will be adapting to the Intel x86 architecture in place of its Power PC architecture. The current Mac computers run on Intel x86-64 processors.
12. Intel promotes egalitarianism (equality) among employees making everyone sit on a cubicle even its current President and CEO Paul S. Otellini and not confined at the privacy of an office. With its 2005 revenues at $ 38.8 billion it ranked 49th at the Fortune 500, Fortune magazine's annual top 500 list of US companies based on revenues.
13. The rest is history and as you may be using a Core 2 Duo on your PC, with a maximum clock speed of 1.06 GHz to 3.33 GHz, remember how the first microprocessor began at 740 kHz out of 4-bit compared to the present's 64-bit. Just beware of viruses however which could mess up with your software and files thus slowing down your PC.
