(Redirected from Intel)
'Intel Corporation' (; ) is the world's largest
semiconductor company and the inventor of the
x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in many
personal computers. Founded in 1968 as 'Int'egrated 'El'ectronics Corporation and based in
Santa Clara, California,
USA, Intel also makes
motherboard chipsets,
network cards and ICs,
flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers
Robert Noyce and
Gordon Moore, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel's successful "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 the early 1990s. While Intel created the first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the creation of the
personal computer (PC) that this became their primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs and in fostering the rapid growth of the PC industry. During this period Intel became the ''de facto'' monopoly supplier of microprocessors for PCs, and was known for aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics in defense of its market position, as well as a struggle with
Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.
The 2007 rankings of the world's 100 most powerful brands published by
Millward Brown Optimor showed the company's brand value falling 10 places – from number 15 to number 25.
[ Brandz Ranking 2007 ]
History
Intel headquarters in Santa Clara
Intel was founded in 1968 by
Gordon E. Moore (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 fourth 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, though fierce competition within the semiconductor industry has since diminished its position.
Origin of the name
At its founding, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce wanted to name their new company "Moore Noyce". This name, however, sounded remarkably similar to "more noise" — an ill-suited name for an
electronics company, since noise is typically associated with bad
interference. They then used the name NM Electronics for almost a year, before deciding to call their company 'INT'egrated 'EL'ectronics or "Intel" for short. However, Intel was already trademarked by a
hotel chain, so they had to buy the rights for that name at the beginning.
The nickname ''Chipzilla'' was coined by journalist and industry analyst
Terry Shannon and published in
Shannon Knows DEC, where it was picked up and amplified by ''
The Register'' and The Inquirer.
Company's evolution
Intel has grown through several distinct phases. At its founding, Intel was distinguished simply by its ability to make semiconductors, and its primary product 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 microprocessor in 1971 and one of the first
microcomputers in 1972,
[ Intel Intellec Series ][ A chronological list of Intel products. The products are sorted by date. ] 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, and Intel embarked on a 10-year period of unprecedented growth as the primary (and most profitable) hardware supplier to the PC industry. After 2000, growth in demand for high-end microprocessors slowed and competitors garnered significant market share, initially in low-end and mid-range processors but ultimately across the product range, and Intel's dominant position was reduced. In the early 2000s then-CEO Craig Barrett attempted to diversify the company's business beyond semiconductors, but few of these activities were ultimately successful. In 2005, CEO Paul Otellini reorganized the company to refocus its core processor and chipset business on platforms (enterprise, digital home, digital health, and mobility) which led to the hiring of over 20,000 new employees. In September of 2006 due to falling profits, the company announced a restructuring that resulted in layoffs of 10,500 employees or about 10 percent of its workforce by July of 2006. Its research lab located at Cambridge University was closed at the end of 2006.
SRAMS and the microprocessor
The company'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 the 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.)
From DRAM to microprocessors
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 drove the company into a focus 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, 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
Zilog and
AMD. When the PC industry exploded in the late 1980s and 1990s, Intel was one of the primary beneficiaries.
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, were used in the IBM PC/AT.
Compaq, the first IBM PC "clone" manufacturer, in 1985 produced a desktop system based on the faster
80286 processor 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.
386 microprocessor
During this period Andy Grove dramatically redirected the company, closing much of its
DRAM business and directing resources to the microprocessor business. Of perhaps more 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 would use to ensure a consistent supply. The 8080 and 8086-series microprocessor were produced by several companies, notably
Zilog and
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 (CA), Hillsboro (OR), and Phoenix (AZ), 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.
Intel Pentium 4 Processor
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 introduced in 1993 as the Intel
Pentium, substituting a trademarked name for the former part number (numbers, like 486, cannot be trademarked). 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. Later, many chip variants were developed in
Haifa, Israel.
Intel's 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, introduced in June 2001. The Itanium's performance running legacy x86 code did not achieve expectations, and it initially failed to effectively compete with 64-bit extensions to the original x86 architecture, first from AMD (the
AMD64), then from Intel itself (the
Intel 64, formerly known as EM64T). Intel continues to develop and deploy the Itanium and the IA-64 architecture as the
Itanium 2.
During this period Intel's Hillsboro team designed and introduced the
★
P6 Pentium Pro in 1995, the
Willamette processor (code-named P67 and P68) and marketed as Pentium 4, and finally the 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, present in some versions of the Pentium 4 and in the
Intel Core 2 chips.
Pentium flaw
Main articles: Pentium FDIV bug
In June 1994, Intel engineers discovered a flaw in the floating-point math subsection of the 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 decided to correct 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
[ Dr. Thomas Nicely's Pentium email ]. 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 the 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 their position and decided to offer 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.
Paradoxically, 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 up tick in the "Intel Inside" campaign, the episode is considered by some 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 (for most users) 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 1990 "
Intel Inside" marketing and branding campaign. 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. By manufacturing leading-edge PC motherboards systems, Intel enabled smaller manufacturers to compete with larger manufacturers, accelerating the adoption of the newest microprocessors and system architecture, including the
PCI bus,
USB and other innovations. This led to more rapid adoption of each of its new processors in turn.
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.
Another factor contributing to rapid adoption of Intel's processors during this period were the successive release of
Microsoft Windows operating systems, each requiring significantly greater processor resources. The releases of
Windows 95,
Windows 98, and
Windows 2000 provided impetus for successive generations of hardware.
Competition, antitrust and espionage
Two factors combined to end this dominance: the slowing of PC demand growth beginning in 2000 and the rise of the low-cost PC. By the end of the 1990s, microprocessor performance had outstripped software demand for that CPU power. Aside from high-end server systems and software, demand for which dropped with the end of the "
dot-com bubble", consumer systems ran effectively on increasingly low-cost systems after 2000. Intel's strategy of producing ever-more-powerful processors and obsoleting their predecessors stumbled, leaving an opportunity for rapid gains by competitors, notably AMD. This in turn lowered the profitability of the processor line and ended an era of unprecedented dominance of the PC hardware by Intel.
Intel's dominance in the
x86 microprocessor market led to numerous charges of
antitrust violations over the years, including
FTC investigations in both the late 1980s and in 1999, and civil actions such as the 1997 suit by
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and a patent suit by
Intergraph. Intel's market dominance (at one time it controlled over 85% of the market for 32-bit PC microprocessors) combined with Intel's own hardball legal tactics (such as its infamous
338 patent[1] suit versus PC manufacturers) made it an attractive target for litigation, but few of the lawsuits ever amounted to anything.
A case of
industrial espionage arose in 1995 that involved both Intel and AMD.
Guillermo Gaede, an
Argentine immigrant formerly employed both at
AMD and at Intel's
Arizona plant, was arrested for attempting in 1993 to sell the
i486 and
Pentium designs to AMD and to certain foreign powers.
[ Worker Pleads Not Guilty in Intel Spy Case ] Gaede videotaped data from his computer screen at Intel and mailed it to AMD, which alerted Intel and authorities, resulting in Gaede's arrest. Gaede was convicted and sentenced to 33 months in prison in June of 1996.
[ Ex-Intel Engineer Sentenced to Prison Term ][ Ex-Intel employee pleads guilty - Guillermo Gaede pleads guilty to stealing Intel trade secrets - Industry Legal Issue ]
Partnership with Apple
Steve Jobs confirms the rumors of the transition at the 2005 WWDC. The lowered "e" is a humorous reference to Intel's former logo.
On
June 6 2005,
Apple CEO
Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be transitioning from its long favored
PowerPC architecture to the Intel
x86 architecture, because the future PowerPC road map was unable to satisfy Apple's needs. The first Apple computers containing Intel CPUs were announced on
January 10,
2006. Apple initially planned to put Intel chips in all of their computers by the end of
2007, and later announced that it would be complete by the end of 2006
[ Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006 ], but Apple managed to have its entire consumer product line running on Intel processors by early August 2006. The Apple Xserve server was updated to Intel
Xeon processors from November 2006 and is offered in a configuration similar to Apple's Mac Pro.
[Jobs: New Intel Macs are 'screamers' news.com]
Sale of XScale processor business
On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's
XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale processor business to
Marvell Technology Group for an estimated $600 million in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The move is intended to permit Intel to focus its resources on its core x86 and server businesses. The acquisition was completed on November 9, 2006.
[ Marvell buys Intel's handheld processor unit for $600 million ]
Recent history
European Commission anti-competitive allegations
In 2007, the
European Commission accused Intel of anti-competitive practices, mostly against its main competitor
AMD.
[ Competition: Commission confirms sending of Statement of Objections to Intel ] The allegations, going back till 2003, include giving preferential prices to computer makers getting most or all CPU chips from Intel, paying computer makers to delay or cancel the launch of products using AMD chips and providing CPU chips at below cost to governments and educational institutions.
[ UPDATE 4-EU says Intel tried to squeeze out Advanced Micro Devices David Lawsky ]
Intel responded that the allegations were unfounded and instead qualified its market behavior as consumer-friendly.
General counsel Bruce Sewell also responded that the Commission had misunderstood some factual assumptions concerning price and manufacturing costs.
[ Intel says EU made errors in antitrust charges David Lawsky ]
If found guilty of stifling competition, Intel could be fined upto 10% of its annual revenue.
[ EU outlines Intel 'market abuse' ] Rival AMD also subsequently launched a website focusing on these allegations.
[2][3]
Core Duo advertisement controversy
In 2007, the company released a print advertisement for its Core Duo processor featuring six African American runners appearing to bow down to a Caucasian male inside of an office setting. According to Nancy Bhagat, Vice President of Intel Corporate Marketing, the general public found the ad to be "insensitive and insulting".
[ Views@Intel - Sprinter Ad (Blog post) ] The campaign was quickly pulled and several Intel executives made public apologies on the corporate website.
[ Apologies from Intel for Sprinter Ad ]
Corporate affairs
In September 2006, Intel had nearly 100,000 employees and 200 facilities world wide. Its 2005 revenues were $38.8 billion and its
Fortune 500 ranking was 49th. Its stock symbol is INTC, listed on the
NASDAQ.
Leadership and corporate structure
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 1997 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 previously was the company president and was responsible for Intel's design win in the original
IBM PC. The
board of directors elected Otellini CEO, and Barrett replaced Grove as
Chairman of the Board. Grove stepped down as Chairman, but will be retained as a special adviser.
Current members of the
board of directors of Intel are
Craig Barrett,
Charlene Barshefsky,
John Browne,
James Guzy,
Reed Hundt, James Plummer, David Pottruck, Jane Shaw, John Thornton, and David Yoffie
[4].
Employee policies
Intel is not typical of its Silicon Valley counterparts. Its culture is not as relaxed and informal as companies such as
Google or
Sun Microsystems. It has a fairly strict meritocracy that rewards work generously and does not keep "dead wood" employees around for very long.
[ iWon company profiles: Intel ][ Big Intel Layoffs Could Come Next Week Andy Patrizio ]
The firm promotes very heavily from within, most notably in its executive suite. The company has resisted the trend toward outsider CEOs. Paul Otellini was a 30-year veteran of the company when he assumed the role of CEO. All of his top lieutenants have risen through the ranks after many years with the firm. In many cases, Intel's top executives have spent their entire working careers with Intel, a very rare occurrence in volatile Silicon Valley.
Intel has a mandatory retirement policy for its CEO when they reach age 65, but only one CEO, Barrett, has actually retired at 65. Previous CEOs all retired before reaching that age; Grove retired at 62, while both Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore retired at 58. At 57, Otellini has a long career at the helm ahead of him, assuming he goes until age 65 and performs satisfactorily.
No one has an office; everyone, even Otellini, sits in a
cubicle. This is designed to promote
egalitarianism among employees, but some new hires have difficulty adjusting to this change. Intel is not alone in this policy.
Hewlett-Packard has a similar no-office policy.
Diversity Initiative
Intel has a Diversity Initiative, including employee diversity groups as well as supplier diversity programs.
[ Jobs at Intel - Diversity ] Like many companies with employee diversity groups, they include groups based on race and nationality as well as sexual identity and religion. In 1994, Intel sanctioned one of the earliest corporate Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender employee groups,
[Intel Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender Employees Home Page] and supports a Muslim employees group,
[ Jobs at Intel - Diversity, Employee Groups (Intel Muslim Employee Group) ] a Jewish employees group,
[ Jobs at Intel - Diversity, Employee Groups (Intel Jewish Community) ] and a Bible-based Christian group.
[ Jobs at Intel - Diversity, Employee Groups (Intel Bible-Based Christian Network) ][Intel Bible-Based Christian Network (IBCN) website]
Intel received a 100% rating on the first Corporate Equality Index released by the
Human Rights Campaign in 2002. It has maintained this rating in 2003 and 2004. In addition, the company was named one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 2005 by
Working Mother magazine. However, Intel's working practices still face criticism, most notably from Ken Hamidi,
[ FACE Intel Index ] a former employee who has been subject to multiple unsuccessful lawsuits from Intel.
Finances
Intel stock price, Nov 1986 - Nov 2006
Intel's
market capitalization is $127 billion (June 8, 2006). It publicly trades on
NASDAQ with the symbol INTC, and is a member of the following indices:
Dow Jones Industrial Average,
S&P 500,
NASDAQ-100,
SOX (PHLX Semiconductor Sector), and
GSTI Software Index.
INTC is a widely-held stock, with almost 5.8 billion shares outstanding. Institutional investors and mutual funds hold 54% of this stock, and corporate insiders, including Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, hold only about 3%. Intel achieved its all-time high closing stock price on August 31, 2000 at $74.87. Since then, it reached a low closing price of $14.62 on September 23, 2002. As of March 2007 the stock price was about $20.
Advertising and brand management
Intel has become one of the world's most recognizable computer brands following its long-running "Intel Inside" campaign. The campaign, which started in 1990, was created by Intel marketing manager
Dennis Carter.
[Anatomy of a Brand Campaign www.intel.com] The five-note jingle was introduced the following year and by its tenth anniversary was being heard in 130 countries around the world.
Intel's old logo
(1968–December 2005)
The well known
''Intel Inside'' slogan
(1990–2003)
Intel's new logo and slogan
(December 2005–Present)
The Intel Inside program was very lucrative for advertisers and further served to broaden the company's awareness as a key ingredient inside PCs. Intel paid half the advertising costs for any ad that used the "Intel Inside" logo. If the ads didn't meet these requirements, Intel did not pay half the cost, and the advertiser was prohibited from using the "Intel Inside" logo. PC companies advertising products containing Intel chips are required to include the jingle in their film and television advertisements in order to receive the reimbursement.
The
Centrino advertising campaign has been hugely successful, leading to the ability to access wireless internet from a laptop becoming linked in consumers' minds to Intel chips. In the UK this has caused some controversy, as the
ASA upheld complaints that this was a misleading advert.
In 2006, Intel has expanded its promotion of open specification platforms beyond Centrino, to include the
Viiv media centre PC and the business desktop
Intel vPro.
In December 2005, Intel phased out the "Intel Inside" campaign in favor of a new logo and the slogan, "Leap ahead". The new logo is clearly inspired by the "Intel Inside" logo. In fact, sometimes "Intel Inside" is used, only this time with the processor name between the two words. Like so: "Intel Core Duo Inside".
In mid January 2006, Intel announced that they were dropping the long running Pentium name from its processors. They phased out the Pentium names from mobile processors first, when the new
Yonah chips, branded
Core Solo and Core Duo, were released. The desktop processors changed when the Core 2 line of processors were released. The Pentium name was first used to refer to the P5 core Intel processors (Pent refers to the 5 in P5,) and was done to circumvent court rulings that prevent the trademarking of a string of numbers, so competitors could not just call their processor the same name, as had been done with the prior 386 and 486 processors. (Both of which had copies manufactured by both IBM and AMD.)
In March 2007, The Intel logo was shown briefly in one of the scenes of the movie, "The Last Mimzy."
Though some in the Macintosh community were concerned that Intel's branding, including the
decals and
jingle, would be used with the new Intel-based Macintoshes (see
Apple Intel transition), this has not occurred.
Intel's "Intel Inside" campaign has generally been considered to be world class marketing. However, over the years there have been several plays on the Intel branding scheme which have appeared on the web. While such jabs at Intel are obviously beyond the company's ability to control, they do tend to show that not everyone believes that Intel's programs and policies are always world class. For example, there is the popular "evil inside" logo
[2], the ubiquitous picture of a tombstone with "R.I.P Intel Inside"
[5], and the descriptive "Idiot Outside" logo:
[4].
Sonic logo
The famous "Dâ™ Dâ™ Gâ™ Dâ™ Aâ™"
jingle (or sonic logo) ''(
MP3 file of sonic logo)'' was written by
Walter Werzowa from the Austrian 1980s sampling band
Edelweiss.
[Paul Morley on the Intel Pentium ad jingle Guardian Online]
See also:
TINY MUSIC MAKERS: Pt 1: The 'Intel Inside' chimes
Open source support
Intel has a significant participation in the
open source communities. For example, in 2006 Intel released
MIT-licensed X.org drivers for their integrated graphics cards of the i965 family of chipsets. On other occasions, Intel released
FreeBSD drivers for some networking cards,
[6] available under a BSD-compatible licence, which were also ported to
OpenBSD.
However, after the release of the wireless products called Intel Pro/Wireless 2100, 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG and 3945ABG in 2005, Intel was criticized for not granting free redistribution rights for the firmwares that are necessary to be included in the operating systems for the wireless devices to operate.
[7] As a result of this, Intel became a target of campaigns to allow free operating systems to include binary firmwares on terms acceptable to the open source community.
Linspire-
Linux creator
Michael Robertson outlined the difficult position that Intel was in releasing to Open Source, as Intel did not want to upset their large customer
Microsoft.
[ Is Intel's "Centrino" Techno-Latin for "No Linux?" ] Theo de Raadt of
OpenBSD also claimed that Intel is being "an Open Source fraud" after an Intel employee presented a distorted view of the situation on an open-source conference.
[ Intel: Only "Open" for Business ] In spite of the significant negative attention Intel received as a result of the wireless dealings, the binary firmware still has not gained a license compatible with free software principles.
Competition
During the 1980s, Intel was among the top ten worldwide semiconductor sales leaders (10th in 1987), dominated by Japanese chip makers. In 1991, Intel achieved the number one ranking and has held it ever since. Other top semiconductor companies include
AMD,
Samsung,
Texas Instruments,
Toshiba and
STMicroelectronics.
The only major competitor to Intel on the
x86 processor market is
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), with which Intel has had full cross-licensing agreements since 1976: each partner can use the other's
patented technological innovations without charge after a certain time.
[ Intel, AMD sign new licensing deal Ian Fried ] Some smaller competitors such as
VIA and
Transmeta produce
low-power processors for small factor computers and portable equipment.
In October 2006, a
Transmeta lawsuit was filed against Intel for patent infringement covering computer architecture and power efficiency technologies.
[ Transmeta Announces Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Intel Corporation ]
Intel filed its response to an
AMD lawsuit[ Intel Files Response To AMD Complaint ] in September 2005, disputing AMD's claims, and stating that its business practices are fair and lawful. In its rebuttal, Intel laid out the skeleton of its legal defense, which included a deconstruction of AMD's offensive strategy and levied the charge that AMD's long-struggling market position is largely a result of bad business decisions and management incompetence, including underinvestment in essential manufacturing capacity and over-reliance on contracting out chip foundries.
[ Intel's Legal Strategy Takes Shape David Whelan ]
Legal experts predict the lawsuit will most likely drag out for a number of years, since Intel's response indicates they are not likely to try to settle with AMD.
Competitors in PC chipsets include
VIA Technologies,
SiS,
ATI, and
NVIDIA. Intel's competitors in networking include
Freescale,
Infineon,
Broadcom,
Marvell Technology Group and
AMCC, and its competitors in flash memory include
Spansion,
Samsung,
Qimonda,
Toshiba,
STMicroelectronics, and
Hynix.
Quotes
See also
References
1. Counterpunch: Amx86 buyers get 'legal aid.' - Advanced Micro Devices offers legal aid to manufactures of Amx86-based machines warned by Intel Corp. to take out patent licenses Richard McCausland
2. AMD sets up website to tell "the truth about Intel" Peter Clarke
3. AMD Break Free
4. [1]
5. [3]
6. FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual
7. OpenBSD to support more wireless chipsets Sam Varghese
External links
★
Intel website
★
blogs.intel.com
★
Intel Science Talent Search
★
Andy Grove interview by iinnovatecast
★
العربية
ä¸å›½
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिनà¥à¤¦à¥€
Italiano
日本語
Português
РуÑÑкий
Español
