Intel Corp. -- based in Santa Clara, California -- has enjoyed a reputation as the world's best-known and biggest semiconductor manufacturer. Intel made some of the earliest commercial processors, or central processing units. While it has since expanded to other computer components such as motherboards, chipsets, graphics processing units and network interface controllers, the company is still identified first and foremost with its processors.
History
Perhaps the most identifiable Intel processor is the Pentium, which Intel introduced in 1993 as its flagship brand. The Pentium's ancestry, however, is traced to the Intel 8086. Also known as the iAPX86 and introduced in 1978, it originated the x86 instruction set architecture that Intel has used ever since for its CPUs. The first commercially available Intel processor is the Intel 4004, which debuted in 1971 -- three years after the founding of the company.
Brands
As of 2011, Intel offers six CPU brands: Core, Pentium, Celeron, Atom, Xeon and Itanium. The Core serves as the company's premier brand of consumer-oriented CPU, installed on personal computers that are divided into desktop and laptop categories. Once occupying the Core's spot, the Pentium is now the mid-range brand, while the Celeron is used for low-cost, budget-oriented PCs. The Xeon and Itanium are for non-consumer, more powerful applications such as workstations, servers and embedded systems. The Atom is the latest addition to the Intel processor family; the brand is primarily designed for the smaller and less powerful variant of the laptop called the netbook, or mini notebook.
Manufacture
Each Intel processor has one, two, four, six or eight cores. A core is a processing unit that determines the amount CPU's processing power; the more cores a chip has, the greater power it exhibits. The single-core Atom is the least powerful, while the Xeon is the only brand with eight-core offerings. Intel gives each processor at least two technologies: Intel Virtualization for combining multiple operating systems into a single computer system; and Execute Disable Bit for protection against viruses and malicious-core attacks. Some Intel Core, Pentium and Atom chips have built-in graphics processing units called Intel HD Graphics.
Pricing
Customers can buy Intel processors to replace or upgrade the chips on their computer systems by going to authorized retail outlets such as Amazon.com and Newegg.com, Inc. The most expensive Intel processor is the Itanium brand, which has a manufacturer's suggested price range of $530 to $4,227 as of 2011. On the other side of the spectrum is the Intel Celeron, which has an MSRP range of $33 to $160.
Tags: Intel processor, processing units, Core Pentium, graphics processing, graphics processing units