Intel invented the memory market, then abandoned it; invented the microprocessor almost by accident; put “Intel Inside” in every office on the planet; and then lost — in sequence — mobile phones, Apple, and the manufacturing leadership that defined it. Few companies explain as much of computing history. This is Intel's trajectory, from the “traitorous eight” to the existential crisis of the decade beginning in 2020, with dates on the table.
1968: the founders who were already legends
On 18 July 1968, Robert Noyce (co-inventor of the integrated circuit) and Gordon Moore (author of Moore's Law, formulated in 1965) left Fairchild — the company they themselves had created after leaving William Shockley in 1957, in the episode of the “traitorous eight” — to found the company that weeks later would adopt the name Integrated Electronics — Intel (initially incorporated as NM Electronics). Employee number 3 was a Hungarian immigrant named Andy Grove, who would become Silicon Valley's most influential manager.
1971: the microprocessor is born from a calculator
Intel started by selling memory (the SRAM 3101 in 1969, the DRAM 1103 in 1970). The product that would change the world came from an order: Japan's Busicom requested 12 chips for a calculator, and Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor condensed them into one. In November 1971 came the Intel 4004 — the first commercial microprocessor: 2.300 transistors, 4 bits, 740 kHz. Intel had the good sense to buy back the rights from Busicom.
1978–1981: x86 and the big break of the IBM PC
The 8086 (1978) launched the x86 architecture still running in your server today; the budget variant 8088 was chosen by IBM for the IBM PC of 1981 — the winning lottery ticket of computing history. With IBM requiring a second source, Intel licensed x86 to AMD in 1982, planting the half-century rivalry we tell in the history of AMD.
1985: Grove's decision
Crushed by Japanese memory manufacturers, Intel faced its first existential crisis. The scene is a classic: Grove asked Moore “if we were fired and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?”. Answer: get out of memory. That's what they did — Intel abandoned the DRAM it had invented and bet everything on processors. The 386 (1985), with 32 bits, and the 486 (1989) sealed the decision as the best in the company's history.
1991–2005: Pentium, the US$ 475 million bug and the stumbles
The Pentium (1993) and “Intel Inside” marketing (1991) turned an invisible component into a consumer brand. It wasn't all glory: the FDIV bug (1994) — incorrect floating-point divisions — cost a recall of US$ 475 million and a lesson in public relations. The decade of 2000 brought architectural stumbles: the Pentium 4/NetBurst chasing GHz at any cost (and heating up like a stove), and the Itanium — the 64-bit bet with HP that ignored x86 compatibility and was overtaken by AMD64. Recovery came from the team in Israel with Centrino (2003) and the Core (2006) architecture, which regained the performance crown for a decade.
2007–2020: the three missed opportunities
The decline came not from one blow, but from three bets declined: Intel refused to make the iPhone chip (2007, because of low margins — Otellini would publicly admit the mistake); lost the decade of 2010 struggling with the transition to 10nm while TSMC raced ahead; and in 2020 saw Apple replace its processors with its own M1 . Along the way, Meltdown and Spectre (disclosed in 2018) exposed speculative execution vulnerabilities that hit its chips hard — and led to years of mitigations in the Linux kernel.
2021–2026: the rebuild
In 2021, veteran Pat Gelsinger returned as CEO with the IDM 2.0plan: become a foundry for third parties and regain process leadership with High-NA EUV lithography. Execution was costly — historic losses, mass layoffs — and in December 2024 Gelsinger left. Under Lip-Bu Tan, with a multibillion-dollar investment from the US government (the CHIPS Act becoming an equity stake in 2025), Intel fights to prove it is still strategic: Xeons remain in half of datacenters, the 18A/14A processes are its bet on returning to the top, and x86 — now in an unprecedented collaboration alliance with AMD — defends territory against ARM.
Intel and Linux: the ever-reliable ally
In our backyard, Intel has always been among the best citizens: historically one of the largest corporate contributors to the kernel, with open network, graphics and storage drivers decades before that became fashionable — from e1000 to i915, Linux administrators know its modules by heart. Meltdown/Spectre also showed the other side of the coin: when silicon fails, the kernel pays the cost of mitigations.
Timeline
- 1957 — The “traitorous eight” leave Shockley and found Fairchild
- 18/Jul/1968 — Noyce and Moore found Intel; Grove is employee no. 3
- 1970 — DRAM 1103, the first commercially successful dynamic memory
- Nov/1971 — Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor
- 1978 — 8086: x86 is born
- 1981 — IBM PC adopts the 8088
- 1985 — Intel abandons memory; launches the 386 with 32 bits
- 1991 — “Intel Inside” campaign
- 1993 — Pentium
- 1994 — FDIV bug: US$ 475 million recall
- 2003 — Centrino popularizes Wi-Fi on laptops
- 2006 — Core architecture: performance regained
- 2007 — Refuses the iPhone chip
- 2015–2019 — Stuck at 10nm; TSMC takes the lead
- 2018 — Meltdown and Spectre become public
- 2020 — Apple replaces Intel with M1
- 2021 — Pat Gelsinger and the IDM 2.0 plan (foundry)
- Dec/2024 — Gelsinger leaves; crisis in the open
- 2025+ — US government becomes a shareholder; bet on 18A/14A processes
Intel is a reminder that no moat lasts forever — not even for the company that literally manufactured Moore's Law. Complete the chip trilogy with the NVIDIA history and the history of AMD.