INTEL CORPORATION

American manufacturer of semiconductor computer circuits. Besides microprocessors, the company makes microcontrollers (single-chip computers), memory chips, computer modules and boards, network and conferencing products, and parallel supercomputers. Its headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif. The company was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who had invented the integrated circuit while working at Fairchild Semiconductor. They formed their own company, N M Electronics, in order to manufacture large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits. The two men were soon joined by Andrew Grove, who remained the company's head into the mid-1990s. The new company soon changed its name to Intel (from integrated electronics). The large-scale integrated circuits that Intel began making late in 1968 were semiconductor memories, which were then 10 times more expensive than magnetic core memories (the industry standard at the time). The company achieved its first breakthrough in 1970 with the 1103, a 1-kilobyte dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that was the first chip with the capacity to store a significant amount of information. In 1971 Intel introduced the 4004, a chip containing 2,300 transistors that was the world's first microprocessor. (A microprocessor is a chip that contains all the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry necessary to perform as the central processing unit of a computer.) With these products, Intel's semiconductor chips began to replace magnetic cores as the memories of computers. Intel's 8080 (introduced 1974) was an 8-bit microprocessori.e., it processed information in groups of 8 bits (binary digits) at a time. The world's first general-purpose microprocessor, the 8080 provided some of the first microcomputers used in cash registers, automatic teller machines, and a wide range of consumer products. IBM chose to use Intel's 8088 microprocessor (introduced 1978) in its first personal computer (the IBM PC), and because IBM's personal computer design was widely accepted, the 8088 and subsequent Intel microprocessors became a standard for all PC-type machines. In the following years Intel produced a series of faster, more powerful microprocessors, notably the 16-bit 80286 (introduced 1982), the 32-bit 80386 (introduced 1985), the 80486 (introduced 1989), and the Pentium processor (introduced 1993), which contained about 3.2 million transistors and could execute more than 100 million instructions per second. Intel dominated the market for microprocessors and was the largest maker of semiconductor circuits in the world.