Intel – Company Overview, History, Products

Intel Corporation is one of the most popular American multinational technology companies known for its processors used in desktop computers. Intel is currently among the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing companies for processor manufacturing after Samsung, TSMC, and Nvidia. Intel currently employs more than 120,000 employees and it is currently headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Intel is also one of the only companies, that manufactures the x86 series of instruction set registers to be used in personal and desktop computers.

The CEO of Intel is Pat Gelsinger. Intel is a publicly traded company and it is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Intel has the ninth highest market capitalization of over 130 billion dollars for a semiconductor company after the market leaders like Samsung, TSMC, Qualcomm, AMD, and Nvidia. Intel generated a revenue of more than 79.024 billion dollars in the financial year 2021. Intel also has the top 46th rank in the Fortune 500 companies within the United States.

These semiconductor chips manufactured by Intel are used by desktop and laptop companies like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo. Previously, Apple also used to put Intel semiconductor chips inside their MacBooks but then they replaced them with their own M1 series chips. Other products manufactured by Intel include central processing units, microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, modems, flash memory, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth chipsets, solid state drives, integrated graphics processing units, and systems on chip (SoC).

Intel is currently focusing on industries like semiconductors, computer hardware, automation, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driverless cars. Subsidiaries owned by Intel include Mobileye and Intel Ireland.

Intel Corporation – History & Overview

Intel was initially founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce on July 18, 1968, in Mountain View, California under the name NM electronics. Initially, Intel focused on manufacturing integrated circuits along with static and dynamic RAMs that were used for producing commercial desktop computers in the 1980s, due to which Intel became an important part of the rise of Silicon Valley. This led to the manufacturing of the first commercial microprocessor, Intel 4004, ever by Intel in 1971 for personal computers. Intel also manufactured the 64-bit static RAM to replace the magnetic core memory system.

By the 1980s, Intel expanded itself for establishing manufacturing plants in countries like Malaysia and Singapore. Since all the companies in Silicon Valley were developing their computers like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple using the Intel chips it became a great source of profitability for the company. In the 1990s, Intel launched its famous Pentium lineup processors for its desktop computers along with the tagline “Intel Inside”.

But since the beginning of 2000, Intel began to face tough challenges in the semiconductor industry because AMD became the biggest competitor of Intel in the x86 architecture. In 2005, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, officially declared that their Macintosh computers would be using Intel-based semiconductor chips. Also in 2006, Intel launched the Core series of processor lineups for laptop as well as desktop computers.

In 2011, after Android smartphones gained market attention, Intel decided to partner with ZTE and Google to launch smartphones using the Intel Atom processor. Also, recently Intel started to gain tough competition in 2020 from AMD who used their Zen microarchitecture, and Apple who switched to their own Apple silicon chips instead of Intel processors.

Intel – Products and Services:

Some of the products and services of Intel are as follows:

RAM – Intel has been famous for manufacturing its instruction shift registers as well as static and dynamic random access memory (RAM). Intel was the first company to introduce these integrated circuits in the 1970s and since then it is leading the market.

Microprocessors – Microprocessors produced by Intel are the biggest source of revenue for the company. Intel was the first company to manufacture the Intel 4004 processor. And now, the Intel core i3/i5/i7/i9 series is being used by multiple companies to make their laptops and desktop computers.

SSD – The solid state drives manufactured by Intel are the most premium in the market and use technologies like NVMe, PCle, mSATA, etc.

Self-Driving Cars – Intel has also been working on the self-driving car industry lately along with Mobileye. It is testing the self-driving autonomous car software which received a 78 percent success result.

Integrated Graphics – The integrated graphics by Intel include the Intel Iris XE graphics and the Intel UHD graphics which help to accelerate the images in a frame to be displayed as output.

Wrapping Up:

Intel is one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing companies that records the highest chip manufacturing revenue. The latest Intel processors include the 12th generation Alder Lake CPUs based on 10nm architecture. Intel also manufactures integrated graphics, solid-state drives, RAMs, and autonomous car driving software.