Intel

Intel
source
Name	Intel Corporation
Founded	18 July 1968
Founders	Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce
Hq location city	Santa Clara, California
Hq location country	United States
Key people	Pat Gelsinger (CEO)
Industry	Semiconductors
Products	Microprocessors, GPUs, SoCs, NICs, Motherboard chipsets, Flash memory
Revenue	▲ US$54.2 billion (2023)
Num employees	124,800 (2023)
Website	intel.com

Intel. Founded in 1968 by pioneers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, the company became the world's dominant designer and manufacturer of central processing units (CPUs) for the personal computer industry. Its x86 architecture and marketing of processors under the Intel Core and Pentium brand names achieved near-ubiquity in desktops and laptops for decades. While facing significant challenges in recent years from rivals like AMD and Arm, it remains a pivotal force in the global technology industry, investing heavily in advanced manufacturing and expanding into new markets such as artificial intelligence and foundry services.

History

The company was established in 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who had previously co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Initially focused on semiconductor memory, notably SRAM and DRAM chips, it shifted its primary focus to microprocessors after the success of the Intel 4004 in 1971. A landmark partnership with IBM in the early 1980s established its x86 architecture as the standard for the IBM PC and its clones. Under the long leadership of Andy Grove, the company executed a highly successful "Copy exactly!" manufacturing strategy and launched the enormously influential Pentium brand in 1993. The subsequent decades saw intense competition with AMD and a landmark antitrust lawsuit brought by the European Commission. In 2005, CEO Paul Otellini declined to produce the CPU for the first iPhone, a decision later seen as a missed opportunity in mobile computing. The company re-entered the foundry business in 2021 under CEO Pat Gelsinger with the launch of Intel Foundry Services.

Products

Its core product families include the Intel Core series of consumer and business processors, the high-performance Xeon line for servers and data centers, and the energy-efficient Atom and Celeron brands for entry-level computing. In the graphics market, it produces the Intel Arc line of discrete GPUs. It also manufactures a wide array of supporting hardware, such as chipsets under the Z790 and B760 brands, solid-state drives via the Optane and SSD lines, and network interface controllers. For the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded markets, it offers various systems on a chip (SoCs). Its vPro platform provides built-in security and manageability features for business computers.

Corporate affairs

The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, at the Robert Noyce Building. Its current chief executive officer is Pat Gelsinger, who succeeded Bob Swan in 2021. Major operational sites, often called "campuses," include facilities in Hillsboro, Oregon (Ronler Acres), Chandler, Arizona (Ocotillo Campus), and Albuquerque. It has a significant international presence with major design and manufacturing centers in locations such as Leixlip, Ireland, Kiryat Gat, Israel, and Penang, Malaysia. The company's research division, Intel Labs, conducts advanced work in areas like quantum computing and neuromorphic computing. It has engaged in numerous acquisitions, such as Mobileye, Altera, and McAfee.

Technology and manufacturing

The company is renowned for its advances in semiconductor fabrication process technology, historically following Moore's law with a "tick-tock" model of shrinking manufacturing processes and new microarchitectures. Its current manufacturing nodes include the Intel 7, Intel 4, and upcoming Intel 3 and Intel 20A processes, the latter incorporating new RibbonFET transistors and PowerVia backside power delivery. It is a major developer of fundamental CPU technologies like hyper-threading, Turbo Boost, and the x86-64 instruction set. The company is a founding member of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium. Its Intel Foundry Services division aims to manufacture chips for other companies, competing directly with TSMC and Samsung.

Competition and market position

In the personal computer and server CPU markets, its primary rival is AMD, whose Ryzen and EPYC processors have gained significant market share. The rise of Arm-based architecture, championed by companies like Apple with its M-series chips and AWS with its Graviton processors, presents a major architectural challenge. In the foundry business, it competes with the industry leader, TSMC, and Samsung Foundry. The discrete graphics market is dominated by Nvidia and AMD, making the success of its Intel Arc GPUs uncertain. In the data center, it also faces competition from providers of custom accelerators for artificial intelligence workloads, such as Nvidia's H100 GPU and various startups.

Category:Semiconductor companies Category:Companies based in Santa Clara County, California