Intel

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.

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. …

Intel's first products were shift register memory and random-access memory integrated circuits, and Intel grew to be a leader in the fiercely competitive DRAM, SRAM, and ROM markets throughout the 1970s. Concurrently, Intel engineers Marcian Hoff, Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima invented Intel's first microprocessor. Originally developed for the Japanese company Busicom to replace a number of ASICs in a calculator already produced by Busicom, the Intel 4004 was introduced to the mass market on November 15, 1971, though the microprocessor did not become the core of Intel's business until the mid-1980s. (Note: Intel is usually given credit with Texas Instruments for the almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor.)

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer era, Intel's profits came under increased pressure from Japanese memory-chip manufacturers, and then-president Andy Grove focused the company on microprocessors. Grove described this transition in the book Only the Paranoid Survive. A key element of his plan was the notion, then considered radical, of becoming the single source for successors to the popular 8086 microprocessor.

Until then, the manufacture of complex integrated circuits was not reliable enough for customers to depend on a single supplier, but Grove began producing processors in three geographically distinct factories, and ceased licensing the chip designs to competitors such as AMD. When the PC industry boomed in the late 1980s and 1990s, Intel was one of the primary beneficiaries.

Despite the ultimate importance of the microprocessor, the 4004 and its successors the 8008 and the 8080 were never major revenue contributors at Intel.

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 eventually extended the x86 architecture to 32 bits instead.)

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. …

In 2023, Dell accounted for about 19% of Intel's total revenues, Lenovo accounted for 11% of total revenues, and HP Inc. accounted for 10% of total revenues. As of May 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense is another large customer for Intel. In September 2024, Intel reportedly qualified for as much as $3.5 billion in federal grants to make semiconductors for the Defense Department.

According to IDC, while Intel enjoyed the biggest market share in both the overall worldwide PC microprocessor market (73.3%) and the mobile PC microprocessor (80.4%) in the second quarter of 2011, the numbers decreased by 1.5% and 1.9% compared to the first quarter of 2011. As of 2023, Intel has a 68.4% market share in the x86 market. In 2024, Intel was the world's third-largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue.

Intel's market share decreased significantly in the enthusiast market as of 2019, and it faced delays for its 10 nm products. According to former Intel CEO Bob Swan, the delay was caused by the company's overly aggressive strategy for moving to its next node.

In the 1980s, Intel was among the world's top ten sellers of semiconductors (10th in 1987). Along with Microsoft Windows, it was part of the "Wintel" personal computer domination in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the 1990s, the company had a 90% market share in the PC microprocessor market. In 1992, Intel became the biggest semiconductor chip maker by revenue and held the position until 2018 when Samsung Electronics surpassed it, but Intel returned to its former position the year after. Other major semiconductor companies include TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Texas Instruments, ASML, STMicroelectronics, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), Micron, SK Hynix, Kioxia, and SMIC.

Since the 2000s and especially the late 2010s, Intel has faced increasing competition from AMD, which has led to a decline in its dominance and market share in the PC market.

Intel's competitors in PC chipsets included AMD, VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, and Nvidia. …

The key trends for Intel are (as of the financial year ending in late December):

Robert Noyce was Intel's CEO at its founding in 1968, followed by co-founder Gordon Moore in 1975. Andy Grove became the company's president in 1979 and added the CEO title in 1987 when Moore became chairman. In 1998, Grove succeeded Moore as chairman, and Craig Barrett, already company president, took over. On May 18, 2005, Barrett handed the reins of the company over to Paul Otellini, who had been the company president and Chief Operating Officer (COO) and who was responsible for Intel's design win in the original IBM PC. The board of directors elected Otellini as president and CEO, and Barrett replaced Grove as Chairman of the Board. Grove stepped down as chairman but is retained as a special adviser. In May 2009, Barrett stepped down as chairman of the board and was succeeded by Jane Shaw. In May 2012, Intel vice chairman Andy Bryant, who had held the posts of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) (1994) and Chief Administrative Officer (2007) at Intel, succeeded Shaw as executive chairman.

In November 2012, president and CEO Paul Otellini announced that he would step down in May 2013 at the age of 62, three years before the company's mandatory retirement age. During a six-month transition period, Intel's board of directors commenced a search process for the next CEO, in which it considered both internal managers and external candidates such as Sanjay Jha and Patrick Gelsinger. Financial results revealed that, under Otellini, Intel's revenue increased by 55.8% (US$34.2 to 53.3 billion), while its net income increased by 46.7% (US$7.5 billion to 11 billion).

On May 2, 2013, Executive Vice President and COO Brian Krzanich was elected as Intel's sixth CEO, a selection that became effective on May 16, 2013, at the company's annual meeting. Reportedly, the board concluded that an insider could proceed with the role and exert an impact more quickly, without the need to learn Intel's processes, and Krzanich was selected on such a basis. …

Intel has been operating in Israel since Dov Frohman founded the Israeli branch of the company in 1974 in a small office in Haifa. Intel Israel has development centers in Haifa, Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, and a plant in the Kiryat Gat industrial park that develops and manufactures microprocessors and communications products. Intel employed about 10,000 employees in Israel in 2013. Maxine Fesberg has been the CEO of Intel Israel since 2007 and the Vice President of Intel Global. In December 2016, Fesberg announced her resignation, her position of chief executive officer (CEO) has been filled by Yaniv Gerti since January 2017.

In June 2024, the company announced that it was stopping development on a Kiryat Gat-based factory in Israel. The site was expected to cost $25 billion, with $3.2 billion provided by the Israeli government in the form of a grant.