Intel
Intel Corporation is the largest integrated circuits manufacturer in the world, according to its annual turnover. The American company is the creator of the x86 series of processors, the processors most commonly found on most personal computers. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968 as Integrated The ectronics Corporation (although a common misconception is that "Intel" comes from the word intel ligence) by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and many times associated with the executive direction and vision of Andrew Grove.
Intel was founded in Mountain View (California) in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore (chemist and physicist, famous for his "Moore's Law") and Robert Noyce (physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit) when they left Fairchild Semiconductor. The third employee of Intel was Andy Grove, a chemical engineer, who ran the company during most of the 1980s and the high-growth period of the 1990s.
Moore and Noyce initially wanted to call the company "Moore Noyce", but it sounded bad (since in English it sounds like More Noise, which literally means: More Noise, an unsuitable name for an electronic company, since the noise in electronic is usually very undesirable and is usually associated with bad interference). They used the name NM Electronics for almost a year, before deciding to call their company Integrated El ectronics, abbreviated "Intel". But "Intel" was registered by a chain of hotels, so they had to buy the rights so they could use it. 58% of Intel's sales come from outside the United States.
Intel dominates the microprocessor market. Currently, Intel's main competitor in the market is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a company with which Intel had technology sharing agreements, each partner could use the patented technological innovations of the other party at no cost and with which has been involved in cross-lawsuits. The other historical competitor in the x86 market, Cyrix, has ended up integrated into VIA Technologies, which maintains the VIA C3 in the market of low consumption equipment. On the other hand, the rise of equipment with processors with an ARM core that threaten to devour the mobile part of the PC market, it is becoming a more serious rival.
On June 6, 2005 Intel reached an agreement with Apple Computer, whereby Intel will provide processors for Apple computers, between 2006 and 2007 making the transition from the traditional IBM. Finally, in January 2006, the first Apple computers, a laptop and a desktop computer, were introduced to the market, with Intel Core Duo dual-core processors.
Intel is developing a project called Tera Scale Computing. This team achieved an 80-core processor with a consumption of 62 watts that reached 1 Teraflop. They have made an improvement that reaches 2 Teraflops, this has been achieved by improving cooling and optimizing the cores, and have managed to raise the frequency to 6.26 GHz. It has a consumption of 160.17 watts, it has been optimized in such a way that at the frequency of 3.13 GHz it consumes only 24 watts, when it is inactive it only consumes 3.32 watts and only keeps 4 active cores.
A document presented by AMD in May 2008 in the Delaware court also retaken by The Wall Street Journal, questions deals with multinationals and Japanese companies suspected of monopolistic strategies. The rival company AMD has made numerous accusations with evidence about alleged pressures on companies by Intel to not acquire other products than this company, remaining the chip leader in the sector. Intel has denied each of these accusations.
Intel has a significant participation in open source communities. For example, in 2006, Intel published under the MIT X.org license drivers for its graphics cards. At other times Intel released network drivers for FreeBSD available under BSD license, also ported to OpenBSD. Intel has also released the EFI core under a BSD-compatible license. Finally Intel has participated in the Moblin project and the LessWatts.org campaign.
However Intel has also been criticized because the drivers of their wireless cards are distributed under a proprietary license. Other companies and communities, such as Linspire, have also criticized Intel. In particular, who has criticized these tactics is Michael Robertson because these tactics only benefit Microsoft. Also Theo de Raadt, creator of the OpenBSD project, has criticized this by saying in an open source conference that Intel's open source support is "an Open Source fraud".
"Intel" is at the 26th Position in this list.
