Also known as: Intel Corporation
Intel is an American semiconductor company founded in 1968 that produced the first commercial microprocessor and became the dominant supplier of x86 CPUs.1
Overview
Intel was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, two veterans of the early silicon industry. Its 1971 Intel 4004 was the first commercially available microprocessor on a single chip, and the 1978 8086 launched the x86 instruction set that still underpins most desktop, laptop, and server processors today.1
For decades Intel built both the chip designs and the fabrication plants (“fabs”) that made them, a vertically integrated model summarised by Moore’s law — his prediction that transistor counts would roughly double every two years. Its modern lines include Core processors for PCs and Xeon processors for servers and data centers; it has also produced chipsets, network controllers, and FPGAs.2
Landmark chips
A few products mark the turns in Intel’s history:
| Year | Chip | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 1971 | 4004 | First commercial single-chip microprocessor |
| 1978 | 8086 | Started the x86 architecture |
| 1993 | Pentium | Brought x86 into the mainstream PC boom |
| 2006+ | Core / Xeon | Modern PC and server processor families |
Where it fits
The PC era was largely built on Intel x86 CPUs running Windows and Linux, and most general-purpose servers — including the machines that host an SDR decoder pipeline or a fleet of GopherTrunk capture nodes — still use x86 processors from Intel or its rival AMD. The architecture’s longevity means software compiled for x86 decades ago often still runs on current hardware.