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Intel is an old stalwart of the computing industry founded in 1968. In fact Intel is older than I am. They made the first microprocessor in 1971. Today Intel has over 99000 employees, 199 offices and facilities, 38.8 Billion in revenue and is number 50 in the Fortune 500. The first computer I ever bought was based upon a 286-12 with 1MB of memory, a 20MB hdd and a 10 inch monitor.
Over the years I’ve had many systems with Intel CPUs and chipset. The first modern system I built had a Intel Pentium 120 with 8MB of memory, a Trident 1MB 8900 ISA video card and a 1GB HDD. The second Intel-based computer I built was a 300MHz Pentium II Klamath with 128MB of memory, 20GB HDD and an ATI Rage Pro Turbo video card.
Intel really was the enthusiast’s only choice for years. Sure Apple had its day, and eventually AMD got into the picture (today AMD and Intel are virtually tied for market share in the retail market). AMD has had a leg up on Intel for the last few years in the enthusiast market, with the introduction of the Athlon 64, the dual core Athlon 64s X2 and more.
One of the big problems with Intel in recent years has been their CPUs run so hot at times with standard cooling that they would give heat errors on boot. The first Prescott CPU that Intel sent for evaluation purposes would not even boot on three MSI motherboards that ran other Intel CPUs 100% fine. Our 955 evaluation CPU runs so hot that I shudder to think of it running every day.
Intel introduced their first LGA-775 Prescott and Extreme Edition processors in 2004 along with the 925X and 915 chipset platforms. Subsequent processors have included the 6xx series (adding 64-bit instruction support), the 8xx series (Dual core), and the 9xx series (4MB L2 cache instead of 2MB on the 8xx series). Today Intel is announcing their next iteration of their CPU architecture, the Intel Core 2 Duo processors and the 965 chipset.
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