Intel Corporation is an American global technology company and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation (though a common misconception is that "Intel" is from the word intelligence) and is based in Santa Clara, California, USA. Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel's "Intel Inside" advertising campaign of the 1990s made it and its Pentium processor household names.

Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and this represented the majority of its business until 1981. While Intel created the first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became their primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During this period Intel became the dominant supplier of microprocessors for PCs, and was known for aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.The 2010 rankings of the world's 100 most powerful brands published by Millward Brown Optimor showed the company's brand value at number 48.

Intel has also begun research in electrical transmission and generation.

Intel was founded in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore (of "Moore's Law" fame, a chemist and physicist) and Robert Noyce (a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit) when they left Fairchild Semiconductor. A number of other Fairchild employees also went on to participate in other Silicon Valley companies. Intel's third employee was Andy Grove,a chemical engineer, who ran the company through much of the 1980s and the high-growth 1990s. Grove is now remembered as the company's key business and strategic leader. By the end of the 1990s, Intel was one of the largest and most successful businesses in the world.

At its founding, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce wanted to name their new company Moore Noyce.The name, however, was a homophone (words that sound similar) 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. They used the name NM Electronics for almost a year, before deciding to call their company Integrated Electronics or Intel for short. However, Intel was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to first buy the rights for the name.

Intel has grown through several distinct phases. At its founding, Intel was distinguished simply by its ability to make semiconductors, and its primary products were static random access memory (SRAM) chips. Intel's business grew during the 1970s as it expanded and improved its manufacturing processes and produced a wider range of products, still dominated by various memory devices.

While Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor (Intel 4004) in 1971 and one of the first microcomputers in 1972,by the early 1980s its business was dominated by dynamic random access memory chips. However, increased competition from Japanese semiconductor manufacturers had, by 1983, dramatically reduced the profitability of this market, and the sudden success of the IBM personal computer convinced then-CEO Grove to shift the company's focus to microprocessors, and to change fundamental aspects of that business model.

By the end of the 1980s this decision had proven successful. Buoyed by its fortuitous position as microprocessor supplier to IBM and its competitors within the rapidly growing personal computer market, Intel embarked on a 10-year period of unprecedented growth as the primary (and most profitable) hardware supplier to the PC industry. By the end of the 1990s, its line of Pentium processors had become a household name.

Intel, x86 processors, and the IBM PC

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. One design win was the newly created IBM PC division, though the importance of this was not fully realized at the time.

IBM introduced its personal computer in 1981, and it was rapidly successful. In 1982, Intel created the 80286 microprocessor, which, two years later, was used in the IBM PC/AT. Compaq, the first IBM PC "clone" manufacturer, produced a desktop system based on the faster 80286 processor in 1985 and in 1986 quickly followed with the first 80386-based system, beating IBM and establishing a competitive market for PC-compatible systems and setting up Intel as a key component supplier.

In 1975 the company had started a project to develop a highly advanced 32-bit microprocessor, finally released in 1981 as the Intel iAPX 432. The project was too ambitious and the processor was never able to meet its performance objectives, and it failed in the marketplace. Intel extended the x86 architecture to 32 bits instead.

386 microprocessor:

During this period Andrew Grove dramatically redirected the company, closing much of its DRAM business and directing resources to the microprocessor business. Of perhaps greater importance was his decision to "single-source" the 386 microprocessor. Prior to this, microprocessor manufacturing was in its infancy, and manufacturing problems frequently reduced or stopped production, interrupting supplies to customers. To mitigate this risk, these customers typically insisted that multiple manufacturers produce chips they could use to ensure a consistent supply. The 8080 and 8086-series microprocessors were produced by several companies, notably AMD. Grove made the decision not to license the 386 design to other manufacturers, instead producing it in three geographically distinct factories in Santa Clara, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and the Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Chandler; and convincing customers that this would ensure consistent delivery. As the success of Compaq's Deskpro 386 established the 386 as the dominant CPU choice, Intel achieved a position of near-exclusive dominance as its supplier. Profits from this funded rapid development of both higher-performance chip designs and higher-performance manufacturing capabilities, propelling Intel to a position of unquestioned leadership by the early 1990s.

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. 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 achieve expectations, and it failed to compete effectively with 64-bit extensions to the original x86 architecture, introduced by AMD, named x86-64 (although Intel uses the name Intel 64, previously EM64T). As of 2009, Intel continues to develop and deploy the Itanium.

The Hillsboro team designed the Willamette processors (code-named P67 and P68) which were marketed as the Pentium 4.

Pentium flaw

In June 1994, Intel engineers discovered a flaw in the floating-point math subsection of the P5 Pentium microprocessor. Under certain data dependent conditions, low order bits of the result of floating-point division operations would be incorrect, an error that can quickly compound in floating-point operations to much larger errors in subsequent calculations. Intel corrected the error in a future chip revision, but nonetheless declined to disclose it.

In October 1994, Dr. Thomas Nicely, Professor of Mathematics at Lynchburg College independently discovered the bug, and upon receiving no response from his inquiry to Intel, on October 30 posted a message on the Internet.Word of the bug spread quickly on the Internet and then to the industry press. Because the bug was easy to replicate by an average user (there was a sequence of numbers one could enter into the OS calculator to show error), Intel's statements that it was minor and "not even an erratum" were not accepted by many computer users. During Thanksgiving 1994, The New York Times ran a piece by journalist John Markoff spotlighting the error. Intel changed its position and offered to replace every chip, quickly putting in place a large end-user support organization. This resulted in a $500 million charge against Intel's 1994 revenue.

Ironically, the "Pentium flaw" incident, Intel's response to it, and the surrounding media coverage propelled Intel from being a technology supplier generally unknown to most computer users to a household name. Dovetailing with an uptick in the "Intel Inside" campaign, the episode is considered to have been a positive event for Intel, changing some of its business practices to be more end-user focused and generating substantial public awareness, while avoiding a lasting negative impression.

Intel Inside, Intel Systems Division, and Intel Architecture Labs

During this period, Intel undertook two major supporting programs that helped guarantee their processor's success. The first is widely known: the 1991 "Intel Inside" marketing and branding campaign. The idea of ingredient branding was new at the time with only Nutrasweet and a few others making attempts at that. This campaign established Intel, which had been a component supplier little-known outside the PC industry, as a household name.

The second program is little-known: Intel's Systems Group began, in the early 1990s, manufacturing PC "motherboards", the main board component of a personal computer, and the one into which the processor (CPU) and memory (RAM) chips are plugged.Shortly after, Intel began manufacturing fully configured "white box" systems for the dozens of PC clone companies that rapidly sprang up.At its peak in the mid-1990s, Intel manufactured over 15% of all PCs, making it the third-largest supplier at the time.

During the 1990s, Intel's Architecture Lab (IAL) was responsible for many of the hardware innovations of the personal computer, including the PCI Bus, the PCI Express (PCIe) bus, the Universal Serial Bus (USB), Bluetooth wireless interconnect, and the now-dominant architecture for multiprocessor servers.IAL's software efforts met with a more mixed fate; its video and graphics software was important in the development of software digital video, but later its efforts were largely overshadowed by competition from Microsoft.

The competition between Intel and Microsoft was revealed in testimony by IAL Vice-President Steven McGeady at the Microsoft antitrust trial.

The Intel Museum located at Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, has exhibits of Intel's products and history as well as semiconductor technology in general. The museum is open weekdays and Saturdays except holidays. It is open to the public with free admission.

The museum was started in the early 1980's as an internal project at Intel to record its history. It opened to the public in 1992, later being expanded in 1999 to triple its size and add a store. It has exhibits about how semiconductor chip technology works, both as self-paced exhibits and by reservation as grade-school educational programs.

Cloud Computing Solutions

IT managers are facing constraints on space, power, and costs. In the midst of these growing demands, a new class of solutions is emerging to transform the data center. Intel views this as an opportunity to deliver cloud-based architectures that enable federated (communications, data, and services move easily within and across cloud computing infrastructure), automated (services and resources can be specified, located, and securely provisioned with little to no human interaction) and client-aware (solutions recognize and optimize delivery of cloud-based applications to any end-user device) cloud services that are built with an open approach. To achieve this vision, Intel is driving an Open Data Center initiative to enable more secure, efficient, and simplified cloud data centers that preserve IT flexibility and choice.

Cloud computing is still in its early stages, with a wide variety of solutions available. As vendors strive to deliver new services and capabilities for the cloud, there is a need to balance the ease of deployment of highly integrated solutions with those that enable interoperability and flexibility to improve cost effectiveness. Without effective leadership and cooperation within the industry, cloud computing will evolve into fragmented solutions that are too expensive and too difficult to deploy and maintain. Intel is working with customers and the industry to realize the benefits of open, multi-vendor cloud solutions with capabilities that are federated, automated, and client-aware.

To achieve this vision, Intel is driving an Open Data Center initiative to enable more secure, efficient, and simplified cloud data centers that preserve IT flexibility and choice, increase efficiencies, and reduce costs.

Use the Interactive Cloud Tool to learn how Intel technologies can optimize your cloud.

Safer migration. Pervasive encryption. Better isolation.

In a public cloud, and in many private clouds, your data is on a server controlled by someone else, which means keeping your data secure is essential. In addition, new cloud architectures make new modes of attack possible. Intel® technology, including Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT), Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard Instructions (AES-NI), and Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) included in the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series improves security by enabling increased isolation and safer migration of virtual machines, faster data encryption/decryption, and hardware-assisted protection against launch-time attacks, making the cloud work for you.

Lower cost. Less energy. Less space.

As space, power, and cooling capacities become limited, maximizing efficiency plays a critical role in preparing for the cloud. Intel technology drives efficiency across multiple areas, including leading silicon power optimization and performance, advanced data center power management, and improved virtualization capabilities. For example, advanced technologies like Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager and Intel® Data Center Manager (Intel® DCM), along with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series, enable significant improvements in data-center efficiency, making the cloud work for you.

Simplify your infrastructure. Reduce complexity.

Reining in the complexity associated with the proliferation and expansion of data centers is a vital step in cloud deployment. By improving automated virtual machine migration, simplifying manageability, enabling unified 10GbE networks, and driving the convergence of storage and servers, Intel technology—including Intel® Virtualization Technology, Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) and Intel® 10Gb Ethernet Adapters along with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series, and Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series—can simplify your infrastructure now and help maintain simplicity moving forward, making the cloud work for you.

Responding to the demands of Global IT Leaders

As a technical advisor to the Open Data Center Alliance, an independent organization of leading global IT managers, Intel will align our technology with many of the usage models defined by the Alliance that address key IT challenges. Some of the usage models Intel is advising on include trusted compute pools for better security, policy-based power management for improved efficiency, and balanced compute in the cloud for more simplified cloud infrastructure.

Intel's Vision of the Ongoing Shift to Cloud Computing

A Paradigm Shift

Cloud computing is an important transition and a paradigm shift in IT services delivery—one that promises large gain in efficiency and flexibility at a time when demands on data centers are growing exponentially. The tools, building blocks, solutions, and best practices for cloud computing are evolving, and challenges to deploying cloud solutions need to be considered.

Intel® Cloud Builders provides best practices and practical guidance on how to deploy, maintain, and optimize a cloud infrastructure. Download detailed reference architectures and best practices to help you get started today.

The Open Data Center Alliance is an independent organization of leading global IT managers who have come together to deliver requirements for next-generation datacenters and cloud that meet IT challenges in an open, industry-standard, and multi-vendor fashion.

Big data sets require big compute power. Machine translation, speech recognition and video processing are some examples of these big data sets. Since they are so large, these big data sets usually require parallel processing and parallel storage systems, often using clustered resources that are accessed over the web. This is the basic model that is referred to as Cloud Computing. Researchers at Intel’s lab in Pittsburgh have two initiatives that support this cloud computing paradigm - OpenCirrus and Tashi.

OpenCirrus is a joint initiative started by Intel, HP and Yahoo as well as academic partners. In a back room of the lab, server racks with nearly 1000 cores were running the Tashi operating environment software that manages the 400 terabytes of resources in the cluster. Individuals and groups can submit proposals to utilize these large clusters to run experiments and develop applications.

New "Nehalem" servers will anchor Intel's renewed push into cloud computing, as the chipmaker focuses on mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers.

Intel's cloud-computing efforts this year will be centered on a new server that uses upcoming Nehalem technology, Intel said Tuesday in a teleconference on its cloud-computing strategy. Nehalem is Intel's new chip architecture currently used only in its Core i7 desktop processors.

Mega data centers potentially mean mega-growth. The world's largest chipmaker sees between 20 percent and 25 percent of server shipments going to mega data centers by 2012. Today mega data centers represent about 10 percent of the server market, according to Intel.

And what is cloud computing to Intel? A cloud architecture aimed at mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers that "can be balanced automatically. Automatically resized and scaled," according to Jason Waxman, general manager of high-density computing at Intel's Server Platforms Group. "Your service is stateless: it's not the same server every time. At any point in time I'm not necessarily accessing the same server."

Intel's goal is to optimize this massive mesh of server hardware. "Optimization is key. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of servers, every server, every watt, every network connection represents cost," he said.

Waxman said Intel will use its upcoming Nehalem silicon to spearhead its renewed push into mega data centers. "We've designed a server for a Nehalem-based board that's optimized for our cloud-computing infrastructure," said Waxman. The "Willowbrook" motherboard will be launched later this quarter, according to Waxman.

Willowbrook is designed with "very efficient voltage regulation," he said, and "we've optimized the layout of the boards" so air can flow more efficiently across the board. Waxman added that "idle power" has been reduced--a crucial metric for mega data centers. "We've been able to take out power. At idle, a standard Nehalem platform consumes 110 to 115 watts, we've been able to get it down to the sub-85 watt range," he said.

Overall, optimization and power savings boils down to cost. For a large cloud service provider, 50 percent of the total cost is the compute infrastructure--servers and storage--and 25 percent is delivering the power and cooling, he said. "75 percent of the (total cost of ownership) is computer, power, and cooling. And this is what Intel is focused on. Optimize the servers and get every watt we can out the servers."

Waxman said repeatedly that Intel is not going to be a service provider but wants to enable customers to take advantage of Intel cloud-computing technology. "We're not trying to become a service provider but we bring all this core technology and expertise together. The capability to look at a cloud and optimize it," he said.

He cited Salesforce.com, IBM, and Microsoft as service providers and added that "it's sort of a wild west frontier" as many of the more comprehensive cloud-computing service products from major companies are not in production yet.

Other technologies that Intel will roll out with Nehalem server chips include Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDQ) that allow traffic to be queued up and aim to resolve an outstanding problem in which one virtual machine can hog all the bandwidth. Waxman also discussed the "I/O hub" technology that Intel is implementing with Nehalem. "It has a tremendous number of PCI Express Gen 2 lanes. Gen 2 for speed and more lanes--that's kind of our strategy," he said. The Peripheral Component Interconnect or PCI bus is a data path to a computer's peripheral devices such as a network card or graphics card.

Waxman also discussed a Node manager. "Within a data center, I'm trying to figure out how to use as many servers as I possibly can and one of the challenges of optimizing a cloud is how do you make sure you don't overload a server and create a server hot spot," he said. The Node manager will reside in the motherboard BIOS.

Mega-task and get more done faster. Workstations based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series deliver next-generation intelligent performance features, such as Intel® Turbo Boost Technology and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, that scale performance to meet your most daunting workstation tasks. Design, model, create, and visualize faster on innovation platforms powered by Intel® processor technology.

With expert workbenches, users can:

• Create virtual wind tunnels
• Simulate virtual drop test
• Virtually test for manufacturability and assembly
• Virtually test ideas with customers with photo-realistic digital mockups

Boost performance by up to 15 times over single-core serversς ‡ with processors that intelligently adapt to your workload.

Dynamically and automatically maximizes server application performance by increasing core frequencies, enabling faster speeds for specific threads, and mega-tasking workloads.

Scalable shared memory architecture with high-speed, point-to-point processor interconnects, plus larger caches and larger memory for two-processor servers.

Up to 18 DIMM slots with up to 288 GB of main memory for higher performance for your data intensive applications.

Inclusive shared L3 cache increases application performance by reducing traffic to the processor cores.

Moves data more efficiently through Intel® Xeon® processor-based workstations and server platforms for fast, scalable, and reliable network performance.

Delivers robust encryption without needing additional appliances or increased performance overhead, improving CPU performance for encryption.


Achieve similar performance as an Intel® Xeon® processor X5570 but with up to 30% lower powerλ using servers based on next-generation 32nm process technology.

Allow idling cores to be reduced to near-zero power, independent of other cores, reducing server idle power consumption.

Automatically put processor, memory, and I/O controller into the lowest available power states that will meet the current workload while minimizing performance impact.

Combine servers from multiple generations into the same virtualized server pool to extend failover, load balancing, and disaster recovery capability.

• Enables more operating systems and software to run in today’s virtual environments.
• Developed with virtualization software providers to enable greater functionality and compatibility compared to non-hardware-assisted virtual environments.
• Get the performance and headroom to improve the average virtualization performance over previous generations of two-processor servers.

Provides enhanced virtualization security through hardware-based resistance to malicious software attacks at launch