Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce — a co-inventor of the integrated circuit — and Gordon Moore, whose observation that transistor counts double roughly every two years became known as Moore's Law and, for half a century, a self-fulfilling roadmap for the whole industry.
The microprocessor era
Intel's defining contribution arrived in 1971 with the 4004, the first microprocessor: a whole central processing unit on a single chip. The 8086 (1978) established the x86 instruction set, and IBM's choice of an x86 Intel chip for its 1981 PC turned that architecture into the standard for personal computing — a position Intel defended for decades through the 386, 486, Pentium and Core lines.
Standing today
Intel remains one of the world's largest chipmakers, but the last decade has been harder: manufacturing-process delays let rivals using TSMC's foundries catch and pass it on leading-edge nodes, Apple moved its Macs to in-house Arm chips, and the AI boom favoured GPUs. Intel is now investing heavily in new fabs and a foundry business of its own, trying to regain process leadership. It is still active, still central to computing — and, for the first time in a long time, genuinely contested.