Chapter 28 Section 1 Times Make Heroes

Intel Corporation was founded in Silicon Valley in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce.Moore and Noyce had previously co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956 with six others.Compared with companies such as IBM, DEC and HP, Intel can only be regarded as a baby for a long time.Saying it is a baby has two meanings. First, it is a small company with a small number of employees and a small business. Second, before the 1980s, almost all computer companies such as IBM and DEC designed their own central processing units, so These computer companies represent the highest level of processor design and manufacturing, while Intel produces low-performance microprocessors, which are used to supplement the low-end market that big computer companies look down upon.Purely in terms of performance, Intel's processors in the 1980s are not as good as IBM's processors in the 1970s.Even in the late 1970s, when Intel produced the famous sixteen-bit 8086 processor, everyone still regarded it as the little brother.For a long time, Intel's products were considered low-performance and low-priced.While it's good value for money, it's not cutting-edge.

Although the 8086 is the ancestor of all IBM PC processors we have today, even Intel itself did not predict its reusability at the time.At that time, Intel did not have a clear market positioning for the 8086, but just wanted to promote as much as possible. IBM was just one of Intel's many customers, large and small, at the time. In 1981, IBM was too lazy to design its own processor in order to quickly develop a PC, so it took Intel's 8086 and used it directly.All of a sudden, Intel became famous in one fell swoop. In 1982, Intel produced the second-generation PC processor 80286, which is fully compatible with the 8086, and used it on the IBM PC/AT.Since IBM could not prevent others from making compatible machines, in 1985 Compaq created the world's first IBM PC compatible machine, and compatible machine manufacturers sprung up all over the world like mushrooms after rain.The hardware of these compatible machines is not the same, but in order to be compatible with the IBM PC, the processor must be from Intel.The figure below shows the ecological chain of the entire personal computer industry.

It can be seen that in this ecological chain, only Microsoft as an operating system developer and Intel as a processor manufacturer are in an irreplaceable position.Therefore, the rise of Intel has become a historical necessity.This is the time to make heroes. Of course, although the wave of the information revolution has pushed Intel to the forefront, Intel must also have the ability to lead the technological revolution of computer processors.Intel's CEO Andy Grove finally proved that Intel is the king in the face of opportunities and challenges.The 1980s when Intel started was exactly the decade of Japan. At that time, the total market value of the Japanese stock market accounted for half of the world, and the total value of real estate near Tokyo in Japan was equivalent to half the total value of the US housing market.The three largest semiconductor companies in the world are all in Japan, and Japanese chips in PCs once accounted for 60% of the quantity (note: not 60% of the price).So much so that some politicians in Japan are blindly arrogant, thinking that when Japan has come to challenge the United States in an all-round way, the whole world is wondering whether the United States will lag behind Japan in semiconductor technology.However, a calm analysis of the global semiconductor market will reveal that Japan's semiconductor industry is concentrated on low-tech chips, such as memory chips (ie, memory), while the world's high-end chip industry, such as computer processors and communication chips The digital signal processors are all in the United States.In the 1980s, Intel decisively stopped its memory business, completely ceding this market to the Japanese, and then concentrated on making processors.At that time, Japanese semiconductor companies made a lot of money in the whole city, and Japan cheered, thinking that they had defeated the Americans.In fact, this is just a move by American companies such as Intel to abandon their sons to seek momentum. In 1985, after Motorola, Intel Corporation developed the second 32-bit microprocessor 80386 and began to expand its market share in the entire semiconductor industry.The development cost of this chip was more than 300 million U.S. dollars. Although it was far lower than the current development cost of Intel's new processor chip, it was indeed a gamble at the time. This development cost exceeded China's five-year plan for semiconductors. The total investment in scientific research is several times.Intel relied on the 80386 to complete the great cause of dominating the IBM PC compatible machine market.

Then in 1989, Intel launched the transitional product 80486 from 80386 to Pentium processor, which is actually 80386 plus a floating-point processor 80387 and a cache (Cache).Relying on the sales of 80486, Intel surpassed all Japanese semiconductor companies and took the top spot in the semiconductor industry.By the way, as an aside, Japan's stock market today is less than 40% of its level in 1990, but the US stock market has risen fivefold. In 1993, Intel introduced the Pentium processor.Since Pentium, Intel no longer names its products by numbers, but in industry and academia, people still habitually refer to Intel's processors as the x86 series.

The birth of Pentium made Intel get rid of the hat of only making low-performance processors.Since the speed of the Pentium processor has reached the level of workstation processors, high-end microcomputers have since then begun to replace low-performance graphics workstations.Today, even Sun Corporation, the first company to produce workstations, IBM, the world's largest computer company, and Apple, which never used Intel processors before, have begun to use Intel or Intel-compatible processors in their computers.Today, Intel has cornered the computer processor market.