Intel Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing units (CPUs) and related products for business and consumer markets. Intel was the world's third-largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue in 2024 and has been included in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue since 2007. It was one of the first companies listed on Nasdaq. Intel supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). It also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, graphics processing units (GPUs), and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel has a strong presence in the general-purpose and gaming PC market with its Intel Core line of CPUs and Intel Arc series of GPUs. Intel was founded in 1968 by engineers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, along with investor Arthur Rock, and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove. The company was a key component of the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center, and was an early developer of static (SRAM) and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips, which represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip—the Intel 4004—in 1971, it was not until the success of the PC in the early 1980s that this became its primary business.
During the 1990s, the partnership between Microsoft Windows and Intel—known as Wintel—shaped the PC market, solidifying Intel's position. As a result, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs in the mid-to-late 1990s, fostering the industry's rapid growth. During this period, it became the dominant supplier of CPUs, and was known for aggressive and anti-competitive tactics in defense of its position, as well as tensions with Microsoft over the PC industry's direction. Since the 2000s and especially the late 2010s, competition from AMD has reduced Intel's dominance and market share, though it continues to lead the x86 market in the 2020s by a wide margin.
History
Origins
Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, on July 18, 1968, by Gordon E. Moore, a chemist; Robert Noyce, a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit; and Arthur Rock, an investor and venture capitalist. Moore and Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor, where they were part of the "traitorous eight" who founded it. There were originally 500,000 shares outstanding of which Noyce bought 245,000 shares, Moore 245,000 shares, and Rock 10,000 shares; all at $1 per share. Rock offered $2,500,000 of convertible debentures to a limited group of private investors (equivalent to $21 million in 2022), convertible at $5 per share. Two years later, Intel became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO), raising $6.8 million ($23.50 per share). Intel was one of the first companies—and the oldest—to be listed on the then-newly established National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System (NASDAQ). Intel's third employee was Andy Grove, a chemical engineer, who ran the company through much of the 1980s and the high-growth 1990s. In deciding on a name, Moore and Noyce quickly rejected "Moore Noyce", a near-homophone for "more noise" – an ill-suited name for an electronics company, since noise in electronics is usually undesirable and typically associated with bad interference. Instead, they founded the company as NM Electronics on July 18, 1968, but by the end of the month had changed the name to Intel, which stood for Integrated Electronics. Since "Intel" was already trademarked by the hotel chain Intelco, it had to buy the rights for the name.
Early history At its founding, Intel was distinguished by its ability to make logic circuits using semiconductor devices. The founders' goal was the semiconductor memory market, widely predicted to replace magnetic-core memory. Its first product, a quick entry into the small, high-speed memory market in 1969, was the 3101 Schottky TTL bipolar 64-bit static random-access memory (SRAM), which was nearly twice as fast as earlier Schottky diode implementations by Fairchild and the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. In the same year, Intel also produced the 3301 Schottky bipolar 1024-bit read-only memory (ROM) and the first commercial metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) silicon gate SRAM chip, the 256-bit 1101. While the 1101 was a significant advance, its complex static cell structure made it too slow and costly for mainframe computer memories. The three-transistor cell implemented in the first commercially available dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the 1103 released in 1970, solved these issues. The 1103 was the bestselling semiconductor memory chip in the world by 1972, as it replaced core memory in many applications. 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.
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