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Intel celebrates 50 years For half a century, today's global society has dramatically improved the digitization of its inventions and made possible the age of the personal computer in the first place. Intel wants to commemorate the celebration on July 18: 1500 drones are expected to rise synchronously at the Santa Clara headquarters and write a fabulous LED light show in the sky. However, the atmosphere is somewhat obscured by some inconsistencies.
Vulnerabilities and Resignation
This should become a world record – showing that Intel is always innovative and agile. But despite the history of success, a circumstance will hurt the mood of birthday: the heart of Intel processors gagging holes dangerous. And that could only be the tip of the iceberg, experts say. In addition, CEO Brian Krzanich recently had to take off his hat because of an affair with an employee.
Exactly 50 years ago, physicist Bob Noyce and his colleague Gordon Moore laid the foundation stone of Intel. Both belonged to the legendary "Infidel Eight", who left the company because of his dissatisfaction with the development strategy of his former employer, Fairchild Semiconductor, and founded his own company. Noyce and Moore have seen the future by connecting multiple transistors on a single piece of semiconductor. With his invention of the integrated circuit, Noyce, with Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, laid the foundation for the modern microprocessor that still forms the core of all PCs today.
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1971 launched the first microprocessor
First, Intel has focused on the production of memory chips. Curiously, the first microprocessor was manufactured in 1971 because two Intel engineers simply ignored a customer 's request. In fact, they should build a chip for a simple calculator. Intel developers then decided, but on their own capital, to build a significantly more powerful chip, Intel's first mature 4004 microprocessor. Only 1978 then brought Intel with the 8086 the first processor of the x86er row on the market, which introduced the era of the personal computer
Over the following decades, the partnership with Microsoft has notably contributed to the rise of Intel's business, which has entered the history under the name of 'Wintel cartel'. More and more energy-hungry software requires more and more powerful hardware. With his small competitor AMD Intel did not hurt with that. For nearly a decade, Intel has threatened the European Commission with a $ 1 billion lawsuit for unfair competition.
The golden age of the PC is coming to an end, and Intel feels brutal about this development. regularly in recent years. Meanwhile, the smartphone is the most widely used device for net access, a great computing power is often praised in the cloud today. Although Intel has managed to gain significantly in the area of servers, Californians have failed to make the jump into the mobile phone era. Despite many attempts, developers have failed to reduce hunger power chips. Smartphone manufacturers have therefore preferred to use energy-efficient processors based on the British ARM chip designer.
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Cooperations
To meet the demand for increasingly powerful and energy-efficient chips, Intel now cooperates with graphics chip manufacturers (GPUs). For a long time, these computers were considered as computer workers in comparison with computer chips (CPUs), to which a simple and recurrent job can be outsourced. But their importance continues to increase for modern simulations and artificial intelligence. In this context, Intel has also abandoned its long hostility with AMD and installed in its latest chipsets "Kaby Lake G" for laptops in addition to its CPU and AMD GPU "Radeon".
Combination units should be much better coordinated and also require significantly less energy. Previously, Intel had already licensed Nvidia graphics chipset technology, but partners are becoming more and more competitive: with its latest products, Nvidia enters the server and high-performance computing market, the traditional domain of Nvidia. Intel
. The current list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, you can see how Nvidia is now positioning itself as an Intel competitor. For the first time in 25 years, no CPU, but the GPU has provided most of the computing power. The arrival of graphics chips in research labs, universities and commercial data centers will forever change the supercomputer landscape, says Michael Feldman, editor of the "Top 500 List".
To put chips. Last year, Intel closed the AMD GPU chief architect, Raja Koduri, who recently announced on Twitter that Intel was planning to build its own discrete GPU chip by 2020.
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Serious gaps and new competition
In addition to growing competition, Intel – and therefore the entire PC industry – could still face very different disasters in a near future: about a year ago discovered in the design of Intel processors, but also from other suppliers. The potential gateway has not been detected for decades. It offers a whole new clbad of attack possibilities with "Specter" and "Meltdown". This exploits a chip design feature, which is supposed to speed up the computation process.
There does not seem to have been an attack, but it can change at any time. Since then, manufacturers have worked hard to fill the gaps with updates and patches – which only reduced the risk of an attack. And: In early May, researchers uncovered eight new vulnerabilities to similar knitting patterns in Intel processors. As reported by the computer magazine "It", Intel even considers that four of the "Spectrum" deviations are very risky.
To make matters worse, Intel is currently without a boss. CEO Brian Krzanich resigned in mid-June after announcing an affair with a colleague. A successor has not yet been determined.
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Intel was on the brink
The crisis recalls the time when Intel was close to the abyss: in the mid-90s, an error in the floating point calculation was discovered in a Pentium chip, which was already on the market. First of all, Intel tried to hide the error and then rectify it tacitly. Intel also refused after protests to exchange them – which caused a wave of outrage in the audience. After all, Intel had at the time a boss who could end the crisis with a word of power: longtime CEO Andy Grove publicly apologized in the press and launched a program of 39, complete exchange. Legend to this day is Grove's motto "Only paranoiacs survive".
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