Once accountants started to run this ship, they sailed onto rocky shores. Profits should be used for research, instead they wasted ~~100 billion on stock buy-backs to keep the funds happy. Those billions, if spent on research, might have kept them off the rocks.
This is the story of the birth of Intel, and with it so many of the firsts that laid the foundation for our current technology landscape: The first DRAM chip, the creation of the first microprocessor (the 4004), on through the release of the Intel 8080.
Debatable to claim the 4004 as "the first microprocessor". It's safer to specify it as the first "commercially-available general purpose" microprocessor. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#First_projects for a few pre-4004 chips that also are debatabley the first microprocessor:
- Four-Phase Systems AL1 chip (1969), which was later demonstrated in a courtroom hack to act as a microprocessor (though there is much debate on whether that hack was too hacky)
- The F-14 CADC's ALU chip (1970), which was classified at the time
- Texas Instruments TMS 1802NC (announced September 17, 1971, two months before the 4004), which is more specifically termed a microcontroller nowadays, but nevertheless the core was entirely inside a single chip.
Deliberate decision to focus on higher-margin products that aren't commodities (like memory). I believe similar logic was used to justify the sale of their flash business.
I don’t really get the Intel/Micron relationship. Much later, Intel collaborated with Micron on their NVME tech (3D Xpoint/optane), but in the end they gave up the product line to Micron, right?
Companies don’t have friends. But they seem quite cozy?
Another very good history of early Intel is the Asianometry video and associated write-up: https://www.asianometry.com/p/intel-and-amd-the-first-30-yea...
Once accountants started to run this ship, they sailed onto rocky shores. Profits should be used for research, instead they wasted ~~100 billion on stock buy-backs to keep the funds happy. Those billions, if spent on research, might have kept them off the rocks.
This is the story of the birth of Intel, and with it so many of the firsts that laid the foundation for our current technology landscape: The first DRAM chip, the creation of the first microprocessor (the 4004), on through the release of the Intel 8080.
Debatable to claim the 4004 as "the first microprocessor". It's safer to specify it as the first "commercially-available general purpose" microprocessor. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#First_projects for a few pre-4004 chips that also are debatabley the first microprocessor: - Four-Phase Systems AL1 chip (1969), which was later demonstrated in a courtroom hack to act as a microprocessor (though there is much debate on whether that hack was too hacky) - The F-14 CADC's ALU chip (1970), which was classified at the time - Texas Instruments TMS 1802NC (announced September 17, 1971, two months before the 4004), which is more specifically termed a microcontroller nowadays, but nevertheless the core was entirely inside a single chip.
How did Intel lose dram to micron?!
Deliberate decision to focus on higher-margin products that aren't commodities (like memory). I believe similar logic was used to justify the sale of their flash business.
Micron itself was often touch and go until several competitors went bankrupt around 2010
I don’t really get the Intel/Micron relationship. Much later, Intel collaborated with Micron on their NVME tech (3D Xpoint/optane), but in the end they gave up the product line to Micron, right?
Companies don’t have friends. But they seem quite cozy?
I recall when Mike Magee of the UK inquirer coined the term 'Chimpzilla'(AMD) as Intel's(Chipzilla) perpetual rival
> The 3101 held 64 bits of data (eight letters of sixteen digits)
The 3101 held 64 bits of data (eight bytes, each representing values from 0 to 255).